What is Markdown?
It is a lightweight Markup Language with a plain text formatting syntax. It's in a readable format
It can be converted into HTML/XHTML and other formats.
Markdown was designed with the intention of better readability .
What is It used for?
It is widely used on Github, eg. Readme Files(Github, etc)
Used in Forum and Blog Posts
It is used in Many Static Site Generators like Jekyll, Hugo, Gridsome, Eleventy, Pelican etc.
Some types of basic formating you can do with MarkDown
Headings
Lists
Emphasis like Bold and Italics
Links
Blocks of code
Images
Blockquotes
Horizontal Rules
Markdown Editors
TextEditor Extensions(VSCode, Atom, Etc)
Markpad
Haroopad
MarkdownPad-2
Typora
Here are the following Elements that you will most often use
Headings
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
Headings in Markdown are any line which is prefixed with a # symbol. The number of hashes indicates the level of the heading. One hash is converted to an h1, two hashes to an h2 and so on. There are a total of 6 levels which you can make use of but for most writing, you’ll rarely ever need more than 3.
Text
*italic*
**bold**
***bold-italic***
[link](https://example.com)
If you want to emphasise a word a little bit, wrap it around the asterisks. For something that needs more emphasis: double asterisks. If you really want to drive the point home, use triple asterisks. If you prefer, you can also use underscores -they’re completely interchangeable. To add a link: wrap the text to which you want to be linked in square brackets, followed by the URL to be linked to in parenthesis. This is an easy way to remember.
Images
Markdown images have exactly the same formatting as a link, except they’re prefixed with a !. This time, the text in brackets is the alt text - or the descriptive text for the image.
Lists
* Milk
* Bread
* Wholegrain
* Butter
1. Clean the room
2. Arrange items
3. Open textbook
Lists are a formatting nightmare in HTML, but Markdown lists are incredibly easy to manage. For a bullet list, just prefix each like with a * - or - or + and they will be converted to dots. You can also create nested lists; just indent a line with 4 spaces and it will be nested under the line above.
Milk Bread Wholegrain Butter
For numbered lists, do exactly the same thing - but use numbers!
Quotes
> To be or not to be, that is the question.
Prefixing the line with a > converts it into a block quote.
Horizontal Rules
---
If you want to throw down a quick divider in your article to denote a visual separation between different sections of text? No problem. 3 dashes can easily produce.
Code Snippets
Some text with an inline `code` snippet
.my-link {
text-decoration: underline;
}
You may want to use example snippets of code to teach your readers a particular syntax. Using a single back-tick around a word in a sentence, you can show a quick code snippet.
Indenting by 4 spaces will turn an entire paragraph into a code block.
Reference Lists & Titles
**The quick brown [fox][1], jumped over the lazy [dog][2].**
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox "Wikipedia: Fox"
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog "Wikipedia: Dog"
If you prefer to use reference lists for your attribution, Markdown can handle this, too. In the above example, all of the links are kept separate in Markdown (so it's easy to read even in its raw format), and then inserted directly as normal links when converted to HTML.
[Dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog "Wikipedia: Dog")
You'll also notice that we've added a title attribute to the links by adding a "word" in quote marks just after the URL. Anywhere you use a URL, you can follow it with a "title in quotation marks" to generate a title attribute.