Getting Started with Markdown

5 Minutes

Learning Objectives

Understand the rationale for Markdown
Create a github account
Create a very Markdown file on github
Learn about some other options for editors writing github

Motivations for the Markdown and github pages Lesson

Markdown makes it very easy to write structured text that can be converted easily into all types of different formats
Markdown is plain text, which means you can read and write it with every text editor. You can also pretty easily see what changed between two different version of a Markdown file.
github is a platform for hosting and sharing code and, increasingly, other forms of work – including Author Carpentry!
Markdown is also a sort of “lingua franca” of github: e.g. all comments and Readme files are written in Markdown
With the help of markdown and github, you can quickly build a modern, custom website.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a play on words on “markup” languages such as hypertext markup language (html) or extended markup language (xml). Markup is designed to make writing and formatting text simple. It is a “plain text” language, which means you can open and read a markdown file with any text editor, including modern ones such as Atom and editors that have been around for more than 30 years such as vi. The goal of markdown is that the plain text is easily human readable (we will come back to that) and that it can be converted into html (and, now, into a whole host of other formats).

Basics of Markdown

The most basic “markup” of a text are bold and italics. In markdown, these are created using a single asterisk for *italics* and two asterisks for **bold**.

Exercise

Create your first text in markdown. Go to the free online markdown editor at Dillinger. Write a couple of words including bold and italics. Try inserting multiple spaces between words. What happens? Try inserting multiple linebreaks between two lines. What do you notice? What happens when you “forget” an asterisk on one side of an italicized or bolded expression?