Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How can format my text easily?

Objectives

• Explain markdown principles

• Give resources for markdown language

• Publish a markdown page on Github

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages. It is used in many platforms like GitHub.

Using Markdown is different than using a WYSIWYG editor. In an application like Microsoft Word, you click buttons to format words and phrases, and the changes are visible immediately. Markdown isn’t like that. When you create a Markdown-formatted file, you add Markdown syntax to the text to indicate which words and phrases should look different.

For instance, to denote a heading, you add a number sign before it (e.g., # Heading One). Or to make a phrase bold, you add two asterisks before and after it (e.g., **this text is bold**).

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Markdown files are just regular text files with the .md extension.

Some examples

*   Use asterisks
*   to create
*   bullet lists.

1.  Use numbers
1.  to create
1.  numbered lists.

*  You can use indents
	*  To create sublists
	*  of the same type
*  Or sublists
	1. Of different
	1. types

# A Level-1 Heading

## A Level-2 Heading (etc.)

Line breaks
don't matter.

But blank lines
create new paragraphs.

[Create links](http://software-carpentry.org) with `[...](...)`.
Or use [named links][data_carpentry].

[data_carpentry]: http://datacarpentry.org

To know more

• Markdownguide a website with introduction, commands, and tools for markdown

• Markdown GitHub cheatsheet presents the markdown commands

Creating Lists in Markdown

Create a nested list in a Markdown cell in a notebook that looks like this:

1. Get funding.
2. Do work.
   • Design experiment.
   • Collect data.
   • Analyze.
3. Write up.
4. Publish.

Solution

This challenge integrates both the numbered list and bullet list. Note that the bullet list is indented 2 spaces so that it is inline with the items of the numbered list.

1.  Get funding.
2.  Do work.
    *   Design experiment.
    *   Collect data.
    *   Analyze.
3.  Write up.
4.  Publish.

Key Points

• Markdown is a language that format text easily

• Markdown uses reserved characters that will be converted like * for lists or # for section

• Markdown files are just regular text files with the .md extension.