Markdown | Simple and Easy language for Formatting Text

Intro

Markdown is a light Markup language for formatting text and more readable content. It’s easy to learn, and you will not regret it after learning it.

If you are a content writer or a programmer who needs to write documentation or tech content on your website, you might have to learn it. A most popular site like Github uses Markdown for formatting. And also, Github has its extended version of Markdown.

For practice, you can check the following online markdown editor link.

StackEdit

Markdown has a pretty small amount of basic syntax to learn. Let see.

Heading

To make a heading, you have to put # before it. If you know HTML, you can think of it as a heading tag. In HTML, there are six different heading tags. H1 is the largest. Markdown’s heading tags are kind of similar to HTML. But here, we will use # instead of h1, ## instead of h2, etc. # is for the largest heading.

See the following example.

# Heading One
## Heading Two
### Heading Three
#### Heading Four
##### Heading Five
###### Heading Six

If you want to write a paragraph, you don’t need any syntax. Just write it as a normal text.

Bold and Italic Text

To make a text bold, you just put ** before and after the text. You can do it another way. For that, we have to __ before and after the text.
Let’s see the example.

Example One

**Markdown** is a language for formatting text. 

Example Two

__Markdown__ is a language for formatting text. 

Italic formation is also simple, and it’s almost similar to bold text formation. But this time, we have to put one * before and after the text. Or we can put one _ before and after the text.

Example One

*I am italic*

Example Two
_I am Italic_

Strikethrough Text

Often we have to show strikethrough text. To show strikethrough text, we have to use the tilde (~) character before and after the text. Let’s see.

Life is ~not~ beautiful.

Blockquote

We often have to use blockquote in our content. To use a line of text as a blockquote, we have to put a Greater-than sign (>) before the content.

> Think twice, code once.

Horizontal Line

If you want to divide your content using a horizontal line, you can easily do it using simple Markdown syntax. For that, use three underscores or three hyphens. Let’s see.

Example One

___

Example Two

---

Unordered/Ordered List

Writing a list of something is common in content creation. So, how can we display it in a formatted way using Markdown? It’s pretty simple. Just put a hyphen (-) before every list item. Make sure there is a space between the hyphen and the text. This is for an unordered list. See the following example for a clear understanding.

- List Item One
- List Item Two
- List Item Three

#### Nested List

- List Item One
- List Item Two
  - One
  - Two
    - Another List
- List Item Three

#### Another way of writing a list

* List Item One
* List Item Two
* List Item Three

Creating an Ordered list is similar to the unordered list. Here we use numbers instead of hyphens or asterisks. Let’s see.

1. List Item One
2. List Item Two
3. List Item Three

Or just put 1. before each list item. Markdown will increase the list number automatically.

Image

Displaying images is a crucial part of content creation. See the following syntax for displaying an image in your content:

![alt text](image link)

See the following example.

![Google Logo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Google_2015_logo.svg/368px-Google_2015_logo.svg.png)

Link

The syntax is simple to create a link text. Here it is: [text](link, title). The Text part is the text which we want to show as a link. And inside parentheses, we have to put the link. The title is optional, this is for displaying the given title when we hover on the link. We can ignore it.

[Google]('https://google.com', 'Google')

Code

If we need to show code block to demonstrate some examples in our content, we can also do it using Markdown. For that, we have to use backtick. There is a difference between single-line code and multiline code. Let’s see both.

#### For single line code

`print('Hello World')`

#### For multiline line code

```
def add_two_number(a, b):
  return a + b

result = add_two_number(1, 1)
```

Conclusion

These are the basics syntax of Markdown. Don’t forget to practice. You can also see the output of the given example code by writing it yourself.

These are not so difficult to understand. I hope you got the idea.

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