Learn Markdown in 3 Minutes

Markdown syntax is extremely simple and you can learn all you need to know within a few minutes.

Formatting headings

# First level
## Second Level
### Third level
#### Fourth level
##### Fifth level
###### Sixth level

Bold and Italics

Bold: **some text**

Italics:  _some other text_

Also italics: *this is also italics*

Links

[link text](link)
example: [click here for a web page](http://google.com)

Figures and Images

Figures are formatted the same as links but just add a ! before the square bracked.

![text description](/path/to/image)

You can have a picture with a link:

[![text description](/path/to/image)](http://twitter.com)

Horizontal lines

***

or

---

Code and verbatim

Inline code: `some code`

Code block:

    some code
    and another line of code
    some more code

Subscript (Pandoc only)

R~0~

Superscript (Pandoc only)

x^2^

That’s most of the formatting you’ll need to get by. I’ll get into citation and table formatting on a separate page.

Next: Tools to Support Your Markdown Authoring

Markdown is automatically rendered to html GitHub but can easily be parsed into a variety of other formats including PDF and LaTex. To convert seamlessly to these formats, you’ll need a document converter. Pandoc is one such open source tool that is available on all platforms. You’ll need to install a local copy to be able to run all the examples in this repo.