Do you post On Reddit,, Disagreementor GirubThere is only one way to add formatting: Markdown. If you want to add a link, bold some text, or even divide text into paragraphs, you will need to know the basics of this text-based formation system.
Does that sound frightening? Trust me, no. Markdown has only a few rules for formatting text as you want, and you just need to learn the rules for the formatting you actually use.
Let’s cross the simple rules, talk about why Markdown is useful, and look at some resources you can use to go further with Markdown.
Markdown’s bases
Markdown is a way to apply a rich formatting to a simple text by adding certain characters to it. On platforms like Discord or Reddit, where messages are short and relatively simple, you really just need to learn a few bases:
- To to italize Text, put an asterisk before and after it, * so * *
- To Bold Text, put two asterisks before and after it, ** like this **
- To include a link, put the text of the link in square brackets followed immediately by the URL in brackets, [Like this](https://justinpot.com/)
- To add an image, start with an exclamation point, with the square bracket containing a description of the image, and the brackets containing a link to a picture file,
- To start a new paragraph, beat in to enter twice, so that there is a clear line between the current line of text and the next.
The top five tips are more than enough for things like Reddit and Disagreement. Although you type what looks like a code when your post is published, all you see is the rich text formatting, complete with links and images.
If you use Markdown to write whole documents, however you will need some document-specific tools. Here are the key:
- To make a header (as the large source text “The bases of Markdown” seen above in this article) start a line of text with a pound sign followed by space, like this one.
- To make smaller titles, use more pounds, ## like this for H2 or ### Like this for H3, and so on. The more pound characters you add, the smaller your header text will be.
- To create a bullet list, just start a line of text with an asterisk followed by space, * like this. You can add as many bullet lines to your list as you want.
- To indent a list, place a tab in front of the asterisk. To indentate further, just add more tabs.
- To create a numbered list, start a line of text with number and period, 1. Like this.
- To indent in a numbered list, add a tab before the number. To indentate further, just add more tabs.
- To add a block quote to your document, just start a text link with “bigger than” sign,> like this.
This covers most of what you need to know to write a document in Markdown. If you confuse yourself about what this formatting will look like, it helps to play around and see the results. Excellent website to do this is MarkDownLivePreview.com. The left panel shows the marking while the right side shows what that will look like. Try a variety of things out there for a bit and you will feel much more comfortable.
Why use Markdown at all?
This might be possible to ask: Why do sites force people to learn a slightly esoteric way of formatting text? And the answer is that this system, even if a little confusing at first, is very straight and clear after you get used to it.
Most people get used to writing on a computer with tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. There are both word processors, meaning they are built to represent a printed page on your screen. They are both called “What you see is what you get” editors – or Wysiwyg editors – that means that the formatting is shown on the screen directly. If you dare any text, you see it as bold on the screen; If you add a link, you see that the linked text is underlined and blue as it would on a web page. There is no way to tell, looking at the text itself, where it dares and ends or what the league’s destination is.
This might seem intuitive, and be fair, is simplicity to it. But this simplicity is possible with a code that the user does not see, and the fact that the code is kept behind the scenes can somehow be confused. Anyone who has tried to add a few words to the end of a link, or right after a connection, knows that this ambiguity can be frustrating – you will end or accidentally make the link longer than you intended, or do the opposite and add a text not linked. This does not happen while writing in Markdown because you can clearly see where it begins and ends and ends.
Markdown files are also future. Because all text formatting, binding and documentary structure -scheme are written in a simple text, a format that has not changed in decades and is not owned by any company, you can be reasonably sure that anyone who finds marking in 50 years will be able to understand it. The same cannot be said about Microsoft Office files.
