How to Use Markdown | Wired

Are you posting it? Above reddit, discordor Gilbthere is only one way to add format: Markdown. If you want to add links, bold text, or split text into paragraphs, you need to know the basics of this text-based formatting system.

Is that scary? Trust me, it’s not. Markdown has several rules to format text the way you want it, and you just need to learn the rules for the format you actually use.

Let’s take a look at the simple rules and talk about why Markdown is useful. And let’s take a look at some of the resources you can use to further your markdown.

Markdown Basics

Markdown is a way to apply rich formatting to plain text by adding specific characters. Platforms like Discord and Reddit, which have short messages and relatively simple, really need to learn some basics.

• In Italicized Text, please put an asterisk before and after it, *like *
• In Bold Text, put two asterisks before and after it** like this**
• To include a link, insert the link’s text into square brackets and immediately follow the URL inside the parentheses (like this) (https://justinpot.com/)
• To add an image, start with an exclamation point with a square bracket containing the image description and a link to the image file!
• To start a new paragraph, press Enter twice to ensure that there is a clear line between the current line and the next line.

The above five tips are enough for things like Reddit or Discord. It’s just a rich text format with links and images when the post is published, despite typing what looks like code.

However, if you are using Markdown to create an entire document, you will need some document-specific tools. This is the important thing:

• To create a header (such as the large text “The Basics of Markdown” above in this article), start a line of text with a pound sign followed by a space #.
• Use more pound signs to reduce the header. ## is the case of H2 or ###, such as H3. The more pound signs you add, the smaller the header text.
• To create a list of bullet points, use an asterisk to start a line of text, followed by a space. You can add as many bullet lines to your list as you wish.
• To indent a list item, place a tab before the asterisk. To indent it further, simply add a tab.
• To create a numbered list, start a line of text with such numbers and periods.
• To indent a numbered list item, add a tab before the number. To indent it further, simply add a tab.
• To add a block estimate to your document, simply start linking the text using the “than than” sign.

This covers most of what you need to know to write a document in Markdown. If you’re confused about what this format looks like, it can help you play around and see the results. The best website to do this MarkDownLivePreview.com. The left panel shows markdown, and on the right you can see what it looks like. Trying out a few different things there will make you feel more comfortable.

Why use Markdown?

This may all ask you: why force a site to learn a slightly esoteric way to format text? The answer is that this system is very easy and clear, even if it’s a bit confusing at first.

Most people are used to writing on their computers using tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. There are both word processors. In other words, it is constructed to represent the pages printed on the screen. Both are called “What You See and What You Get” editors, or WysiWyg editors. This means that the format will be displayed directly on the screen. If you make some text bold, you see it as bold on the screen. When you add a link, the linked text is underlined and turns blue like a web page. There is no way to see the text itself, to know where bold begins and ends, or to what the link destination is.

This may seem intuitive, and to be fair, it has simplicity. But its simplicity is made possible by code that users don’t see, and the fact that the code is kept behind the scenes can be confusing in a way. I know that anyone who tried to add a few words to the end of the link, or that this ambiguity can be frustrating right after the link. You will eventually end up creating a link for a long time, adding unlinked text to add a link, or adding a link. This does not happen while writing in markdown, as you can clearly see where all formats start and end.

The Markdown file is also a basis for the future. The format, links, and document structure schemas for all text have not changed in decades and are written in plain text, a format not owned by one company, so you can reasonably be sure that those who found the markdown file in 50 years will be able to understand it. The same cannot be said about Microsoft Office files.