Welcome to Instant Markdown. This book has been especially created to provide you with all the information you need to set up Markdown. Markdown is a simple way to add headings, links, and rich formatting to plain text documents and convert them to perfect HTML files. You will learn the syntax of Markdown, get started with writing and doing some cool things, and discover some tips and tricks for using Markdown.
This document contains the following sections:
So what is Markdown? helps you find out what Markdown actually is, what you can do with it, and why it's so great.
Installation will help you learn how to download and install Markdown with minimum fuss and then set it up so that you can use it as soon as possible.
Quick start – Creating your first Markdown document will show you how to get started with Markdown.
Top 8 features you need to know about will help you learn how to perform eight tasks with the most important features of Markdown. By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following with Markdown:
- Participating in forums and discussions: Use Markdown on different websites
- Writing e-mails: Write e-mails with Markdown quickly and easily
- Sharing documents: Share a single Markdown document with others
- Blogging: Create a blog using Markdown
- To-Do lists: Create To-Do lists with Markdown
- Presentations: Create beautiful, simple, and interactive presentations
- Converting files to other formats: Convert a document to other formats such as PDF
- Using Markdown extensions: Use extensions to get more advanced features
People and places you should get to know provides you with many useful links to the project page and forums as well as a number of helpful articles, tutorials, blogs, and Twitter feeds of Markdown's super contributors.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that simplifies the workflow of web writers. It was created in 2004 by John Gruber with contributions and feedback from Aaron Swartz.
Markdown was described by John Gruber as:
"A text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)."
Markdown is two different things:
- A simple syntax to create documents in plain text
- A software tool written in Perl that converts the plain text formatting to HTML
Markdown's formatting syntax was designed with simplicity and readability as a design goal. We add rich formatting to plain text without considering that we are writing using a markup language.
Markdown is:
- Easy to use: Markdown has an extremely simple syntax that you can learn quickly
- Fast: Writing is much faster than with HTML, we can dramatically reduce the time we spend crafting HTML tags
- Clean: We can clearly read and write documents that are always translated into HTML without mistakes or errors
- Flexible: It is suitable for many things such as writing on the Internet, e-mails, creating presentations
- Portable: Documents are just plain text; we can edit Markdown with any basic text editor in any operating system
- Made for writers: Writers can focus on distraction-free writing
Here, we can see a quick comparison of the same document between HTML and Markdown. This is the final result that we achieve in both cases:
The following code is written in HTML:
<h1>Markdown</h1> <p>This a <strong>simple</strong> example of Markdown.</p> <h2>Features:</h2> <ul> <li>Simple</li> <li>Fast</li> <li>Portable</li> </ul> <p>Check the <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">official website</a>.</p>
The following code is an equivalent document written in Markdown:
# Markdown This a **simple** example of Markdown. ## Features: - Simple - Fast - Portable Check the [official website]. [official website]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/