Markdown CheatSheet

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor.

John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form.

Markdown is widely used in blogging, instant messaging, online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.

The initial description of Markdown contained ambiguities and raised unanswered questions. To correct these problems, later implementations introduced subtle differences from the original version as well as syntax extensions.

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 isnt 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 example, 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**). It may take a while to get used to seeing Markdown syntax in your text, especially if youre accustomed to WYSIWYG applications. The screenshot below shows a Markdown file displayed in the Visual Studio Code text editor.

Many technical writers find lots of benefits in using Markdown for their documentation. Some of these benefits are:

• Markdown provides semantic meaning for content in a relatively simple way
• You can write rich formatted content extremely quickly (compared to writing directly in HTML tags)
• You can read Markdown easily in plain text before rendered by HTML
• It doesnt interrupt your workflow with the need to click buttons
• Its platform-agnostic so your content is not tied to the format of your editor

Markdown is also lightweight, which means you dont have to learn a lot to get started with it.

Lots of product documentation is written in Markdown because it is so versatile, and it can usually be transferred between different platforms. For example, you can write in Markdown in a text editor like Atom, or even a version-control platform such as GitHub since that also supports Markdown.

Markdown can be used in Static Site Generators such as Jekyll or Hugo, which are tools specifically designed to be documentation sites.

It also works in Document360's knowledge base software, which allows you to work in Markdown in the editor and provides shortcuts for writing in Markdown.

For our purposes, Markdown is plain text formatting syntax??but its also a tool (parser) that converts this plain text formatting into HTML to display on the web.

The Markdown syntax is the information that your tool holds about the text. So for example, presentational syntax tells you how to present the text, as in the case of making it bold or underlined. Semantic syntax tells you what the text actually is, so that could be a list or a reference.

Markdown is fairly notable in that it combines both presentational and semantic syntax.

You might be wondering why people use Markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor. Why write with Markdown when you can press buttons in an interface to format your text? As it turns out, there are a couple of different reasons why people use Markdown instead of WYSIWYG editors.

• Markdown can be used for everything. People use it to create websites, documents, notes, books, presentations, email messages, and technical documentation.

• Markdown is portable. Files containing Markdown-formatted text can be opened using virtually any application. If you decide you dont like the Markdown application youre currently using, you can import your Markdown files into another Markdown application. Thats in stark contrast to word processing applications like Microsoft Word that lock your content into a proprietary file format.

• Markdown is platform-independent. You can create Markdown-formatted text on any device running any operating system.

• Markdown is future proof. Even if the application youre using stops working at some point in the future, youll still be able to read your Markdown-formatted text using a text editing application. This is an important consideration when it comes to books, university theses, and other milestone documents that need to be preserved indefinitely.

• Markdown is everywhere. Websites like Reddit and GitHub support Markdown, and lots of desktop and web-based applications support it.

# h1
## h2
### h3
#### h4
##### h5
###### h6

Header 1
========


Header 2
--------

> This is
> a blockquote
>
> > Nested
> > Blockquote

* Item A
* Item B
    * item C1
    * item C2
    * item C3
    * item C4

<!-- or -->
- Item 1
- Item 2


<!-- or -->
+ Item 1
+ Item 2


<!-- or -->
- [ ] Checkbox off
- [x] Checkbox on

1. Item A
2. Item B
    a. item C1
    b. item C2

[link](https://bestforstudy.com.com)

[link][google]

[google]: https://bestforstudy.com.com

*italic*
_italic_


**bold**
__bold__


`inline code`
~~struck out~~

<!-- Hyphens -->
---


<!-- Asterisks -->
***


<!-- Underscores -->
___

```javascript
console.log("This is a javascript block code")
```


~~~css
.button { background-color: red; }
~~~


    4 space indent makes a code block


inline code
`Inline code` has back-ticks around it

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