{"id":14871,"date":"2014-10-22T19:40:03","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T23:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/?p=14871"},"modified":"2014-10-28T23:16:27","modified_gmt":"2014-10-29T03:16:27","slug":"an-introduction-to-markdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2014\/10\/an-introduction-to-markdown\/","title":{"rendered":"An Introduction to Markdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you blog, write notes, write articles or books, or any form of writing with formatted text you might want to consider using Markdown.<\/p>\n

John Gruber<\/a> who created Markdown a decade ago describes it this way:<\/p>\n

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax that allows you to write in an text editor and then have it converted to valid XHTML (or HTML).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What this means is that you can write formatted text using any text editor and then via a software tool have it converted to an HTML document. As the use of Markdown has grown there are tools for converting it to many other forms including PDF. One source document can be converted to multiple formats.<\/p>\n

I use Markdown as part of my daily workflow to write notes, help documents, blog posts, and pretty much any writing workflow. The main reason I like Markdown is that I can write even heavily formatted documents in plain text and still have the plain text version be very readable. Often I don\u2019t even convert these documents since I can easily read them as is. While I could certainly write them using HTML tags that really reduces the readability and it can quickly be difficult to read in plain text form. Once I have written a document in Markdown I can quickly convert it into the medium of choice. I use it to quickly create ebooks from Markdown documents along with converting online web pages into Markdown for reference later.<\/p>\n

To give you an example of how easy Markdown is to use, here are some examples.<\/p>\n

By using one or more Number signs # I can quickly write headers and use > to create blockquotes.<\/p>\n

For example:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
# Header 2\r\n\r\n> This is an example of a blockquote<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/dt>\n
<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
Header 2<\/h2>\n
This is an example of a blockquote<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Bold and italics can be accomplished using:<\/p>\n
    This item is **bold** and this is using _italics_.<\/code><\/pre>\n
Becomes:<\/p>\n
This item is bold<\/strong> and this is using italics<\/em><\/p>\n
Want to write lists?<\/p>\n
+ This is item one\r\n    * Indented list item\r\n+ This is item two\r\n+ This is item three\r\n\r\n1. This is a numeric list item one\r\n2. This is a numeric list item two\r\n3. This is a numeric list item three<\/code><\/pre>\n
Becomes:<\/p>\n