Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like *emphasis*. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email.

A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines. (A blank line is any line that looks like a blank line, a line containing nothing but spaces or tabs is considered blank.)
Normal paragraphs should not be indented with spaces or tabs.

The implication of the “one or more consecutive lines of text” rule is that Markdown supports “hard-wrapped” text paragraphs. This differs significantly from most other text-to-HTML formatters (including Movable Type’s “Convert Line Breaks” option) which translate every line break character in a paragraph into a <br /> tag.

When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return. Yes, this takes a tad more effort to create a <br />, but a simplistic “every line break is a <br />” rule wouldn’t work for Markdown. Markdown’s email-style blockquoting and multi-paragraph list items work best and look better when you format them with hard breaks.

Any number of underlining =’s or -’s will work.
Atx-style headers use 1-6 hash characters at the start of the line, corresponding to header levels 1-6.

Optionally, you may “close” atx-style headers. This is purely cosmetic you can use this if you think it looks better. The closing hashes don’t even need to match the number of hashes used to open the header. (The number of opening hashes determines the header level.) :

# This is an H1 #

## This is an H2 ##############

###### This is an H6 #

Markdown uses email-style > characters for blockquoting. If you’re familiar with quoting passages of text in an email message, then you know how to create a blockquote in Markdown. It looks best if you hard wrap the text and put a > before every line:

> This is a blockquote with two paragraphs. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
> consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam hendrerit mi posuere lectus.
> Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet vitae, risus.  
> 
> Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum sit amet velit. Suspendisse
> id sem consectetuer libero luctus adipiscing.

Markdown allows you to be lazy and only put the > before the first line of a hard-wrapped paragraph:

> This is a blockquote with two paragraphs. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam hendrerit mi posuere lectus.
Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet vitae, risus.  
 
> Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum sit amet velit. Suspendisse
id sem consectetuer libero luctus adipiscing.

Blockquotes can be nested (i.e. a blockquote-in-a-blockquote) by adding additional levels of >:

> This is the first level of quoting.
>
> > This is nested blockquote.
>
> Back to the first level.

Blockquotes can contain other Markdown elements, including headers, lists, and code blocks:

> ## This is a header.
> 
> 1.   This is the first list item.
> 2.   This is the second list item.
> 
> Here's some example code:
> 
>     return shell_exec("echo $input | $markdown_script");

Markdown supports ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists.

Unordered lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens interchangeably as list markers:

*   Red
*   Green
*   Blue

---

+   Red
+   Green
+   Blue

---

-   Red
-   Green
-   Blue

Ordered lists use numbers followed by periods:

1.  Bird
2.  McHale
3.  Parish

---

1.  Bird
1.  McHale
1.  Parish

---

3. Bird
1. McHale
8. Parish

Pre-formatted code blocks are used for writing about programming or markup source code. To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab.One level of indentation is removed from each line of the code block. For example:

    tell application "Foo"
        beep
    end tell

tell application "Foo"
    beep
end tell

Within a code block, ampersands (&) and angle brackets (< and >) are automatically converted into HTML entities. This makes it very easy to include example HTML source code using Markdown just paste it and indent it, and Markdown will handle the hassle of encoding the ampersands and angle brackets.

Regular Markdown syntax is not processed within code blocks. E.g., asterisks are just literal asterisks within a code block. This means it’s also easy to use Markdown to write about Markdown’s own syntax.

You can produce a horizontal rule tag (<hr />) by placing three or more hyphens, asterisks, or underscores on a line by themselves. If you wish, you may use spaces between the hyphens or asterisks.

* * *

***

*****

- - -

___

---------------------------------------

Markdown supports 3 style of links: inline, reference and direct. In both inline and reference, the link text is delimited by [square brackets]. To create an inline link, use a set of regular parentheses immediately after the link text’s closing square bracket. Inside the parentheses, put the URL where you want the link to point, along with an optional title for the link, surrounded in quotes.If you simply want to be able to click at an URL inserted in your text, put the URL between angle brackets and Markdown will make a clickable link with it.

This is [an example](https://example.com/ "Titel") inline link.  
[This link](https://example.net/) has no title attribute.

Reference-style links use a second set of square brackets, inside which you place a label of your choosing to identify the link.

This is [an example][id] reference-style link.  
[BentiGorlich][]
<https://bentigorlich.de>  
[id]: https://example.com/ "Optional Title Here"
[BentiGorlich]: https://bentigorlich.de/

Markdown treats asterisks (*) and underscores (_) as indicators of emphasis. Text wrapped with one * or _ will be italic; double *’s or _’s will be bold.

*single asterisks*  
_single underscores_  
**double asterisks**  
__double underscores__
un*frigging*believable

To indicate a span of code, wrap it with backtick quotes (`). Unlike a pre-formatted code block, a code span indicates code within a normal paragraph.

Use the `printf()` function.  
``There is a literal backtick (`) here.``

Admittedly, it’s fairly difficult to devise a “natural” syntax for placing images into a plain text document format. Markdown uses an image syntax that is intended to resemble the syntax for links, allowing for two styles: inline and reference.

![Alt text](https://bentigorlich.de/favicon.ico "Optional title")  
![Logo][] 

[logo]: https://bentigorlich.de/favicon.ico "Logo" 

First line contains column headers; second line contains a mandatory separator line between the headers and the content; each following line is a row in the table. Columns are always separated by the pipe (|) character.You can specify alignment for each column by adding colons to separator lines. A colon at the left of the separator line will make the column left-aligned; a colon on the right of the line will make the column right-aligned; colons at both side means the column is center-aligned.

| Function name | Description                    |
| ------------- | -----------------------------: |
| `help()`      | Display the help window.       |
| `destroy()`   | **Destroy your computer!**     |

Footnotes work mostly like reference-style links. A footnote is made of two things: a marker in the text that will become a superscript number; a footnote definition that will be placed in a list of footnotes at the end of the document

Footnote definitions can be found anywhere in the document, but footnotes will always be listed in the order they are linked to in the text. Note that you cannot make two links to the same footnotes: if you try, the second footnote reference will be left as plain text.

Each footnote must have a distinct name. That name will be used to link footnote references to footnote definitions, but has no effect on the numbering of the footnotes.

That's some text with a footnote.[^1]  

[^1]: And that's the footnote.  
    That's the second paragraph.