Whether you post On Reddit, Discord, or GitHub, there is only one way to add formats: Markdown. If you want to add links, capitalize some text, or even divide text into paragraphs, you need to know the basics of this text-based formatting system.
Does that sound scary? Trust me, no. Markdown only has some rules to format text the way you want, and you just need to learn the rules of the format you actually use.
Let’s introduce simple rules, discuss why Markdown is useful, and then check out some resources you can use Markdown to further develop.
The basis for price reduction
Markdown is a way to apply rich formats to plaintext by adding certain characters to it. On platforms like not being, the message is short and relatively simple, and you really only need to learn some basics:
- arrive Italic Text, put an asterisk before and after it *like this *
- arrive Bold Text, put two asterisks before and after, **like** **
- To include a link, put the text of the link in square brackets and immediately put the URL in the brackets, [Like this](https://justinpot.com/)
- To add an image, start with an exclamation mark, the square bracket contains the description of the image, and the brackets containing the link to the image file,
- To start a new paragraph, click twice to have a clear boundary between the current text and the next line.
The above five tips are far from enough for things like Reddit and Discord. Even if you are typing something that looks like code, when you post, you will only see rich text formats, with links and images.
However, if you use Markdown to write your entire document, you need some documentation-specific tools. This is the key:
- To make a title (for example, the large text “The Basics of Promotion” shown in this article) starts a text with a pound sign and then a space, # like this.
- To make smaller titles, use more pound logos, like H2 like this or ###, and so on. The more pound logos you add, the smaller the title text will be.
- To create a bulleted list, just start the text line with an asterisk, then a space, *this way. You can add as many bullet lines as you like to the list.
- To indent the list item, place a tab before the asterisk. To further, just add more tabs.
- To create a numbered list, start a line of text with a number and a sequence 1.
- To indent the numbered list item, add a tab before the numbering. To further, just add more tabs.
- To add a block quote to the document, just start a text link with the “Greater than Larger” symbol, > This way.
This covers most of what you need to know to write a document in Markdown. If you are confused about the appearance of this format, it will help to play and see the results. A great website is on Markdownlivepreview.com. The left panel shows the price reduction, while the right side shows its appearance. Try something different there and you will feel more comfortable.
Why use Markdown entirely?
You might ask all of this: Why do websites force people to learn a slightly esoteric way of formatting text? The answer is that even if it’s a little confusing at first, the system is simple and straightforward once you get used to it.
Most people are used to writing on computers using tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Both word processors have it, meaning they are built to represent printed pages on the screen. They are also called the “What you see is what you get” editor or the Wysiwyg editor, which means the format is displayed directly on the screen. If you capitalize some text, you will treat it as bold on the screen. If you add a link, you will see that the text of the link is underlined and turns blue as if it is on the web page. By looking at the text itself, what is the destination of a bold beginning and end or link, it is impossible to tell.
This seems intuitive, and to be fair, it’s simple. However, the code that users cannot see makes this simplicity possible, and the fact that the code can cause confusion in some ways behind the scenes. Anyone who tries to add a few words at the end of a link, or after the link, knows that this ambiguity can be frustrating – you end up accidentally making the link longer than expected, or doing the opposite text and adding unlinked text. This doesn’t happen when writing in Markdown, as you can clearly see the beginning and end of all formats.
Price reduction documents are also in the future. Because all text formats, links and document structures are written in plain text, this format has not changed over decades and is not owned by any company, you can reasonably be sure that anyone who finds a Markdown file in 50 years will understand it. The same thing cannot be said about Microsoft Office files.
