Look at the markdown cheat sheet

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a simple markup language that can be used to add formatting elements to plain text. You are probably more familiar with text editors like Microsoft Word. These work on a what you see is what you get principle. That means, that the content you edit directly resembles its appearance when you export or print it. In Word, if you want to highlight a word and make it italic, then you select it, and press the button to format it to italic. If you want to create a headline, you have to select the text, and then format it to the right size, maybe make it bold and underline it.

Markdown, on the other hand, is a markup language and operates on a what you see is what you mean principle. If you, for example, want a word to be italic, then you write it in asterisks *this text will be italic*. To create a headline, you do this with a small command, in this case a #:

# I am a Headline
And I am a normaly formated text.

These small commands then get interpreted and exported. The benefit is, that we can export it with different options, so the same content can be displayed in many different ways. Markdown is used to create documents, notes, books, presentations, documentations (like this one), or websites, like here. Maby famous websites use markdown, wikipedia and reddit for example. Or, in this project, BlastoDB is also written in markdown.

In the following, you find the basic markdown syntax to create simple text files. If you want more information around markdown, check out this the Getting Started guide on markdownguide.org. This website is generally a good resource around the usual markdown syntax.