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MARKDOWN(7) BSD Miscellaneous Information Manual MARKDOWN(7)
NAME
Markdown — The Markdown text formatting syntax
DESCRIPTION
Philosophy
Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasi‐
ble.
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 Mark‐
down's syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML fil‐
ters -- 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 char‐
acters, 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.
Inline HTML
Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for
writing for the web.
Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax
is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags.
The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML
tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for
Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a
publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown's format‐
ting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simply use
HTML itself. There's no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that
you're switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.
The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements -- e.g. <div>,
<table>, <pre>, <p>, etc. -- must be separated from surrounding content
by blank lines, and the start and end tags of the block should not be
indented with tabs or spaces. Markdown is smart enough not to add extra
(unwanted) <p> tags around HTML block-level tags.
For example, to add an HTML table to a Markdown article:
This is a regular paragraph.
<table>
<tr>
<td>Foo</td>
</tr>
</table>
This is another regular paragraph.
Note that Markdown formatting syntax is not processed within block-level
HTML tags. E.g., you can't use Markdown-style *emphasis* inside an HTML
block.
Span-level HTML tags -- e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> -- can be used
anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header. If you want, you
can even use HTML tags instead of Markdown formatting; e.g. if you'd pre‐
fer to use HTML <a> or <img> tags instead of Markdown's link or image
syntax, go right ahead.
Unlike block-level HTML tags, Markdown syntax *is* processed within span-
level tags.
Automatic Escaping for Special Characters
In HTML, there are two characters that demand special treatment: `<` and
`&`. Left angle brackets are used to start tags; ampersands are used to
denote HTML entities. If you want to use them as literal characters, you
must escape them as entities, e.g. `<`, and `&`.
Ampersands in particular are bedeviling for web writers. If you want to
write about 'AT&T', you need to write '`AT&T`'. You even need to
escape ampersands within URLs. Thus, if you want to link to:
http://images.google.com/images?num=30&q=larry+bird
you need to encode the URL as:
http://images.google.com/images?num=30&q=larry+bird
in your anchor tag `href` attribute. Needless to say, this is easy to
forget, and is probably the single most common source of HTML validation
errors in otherwise well-marked-up web sites.
Markdown allows you to use these characters naturally, taking care of all
the necessary escaping for you. If you use an ampersand as part of an
HTML entity, it remains unchanged; otherwise it will be translated into
`&`.
So, if you want to include a copyright symbol in your article, you can
write:
©
and Markdown will leave it alone. But if you write:
AT&T
Markdown will translate it to:
AT&T
Similarly, because Markdown supports inline HTML, if you use angle brack‐
ets as delimiters for HTML tags, Markdown will treat them as such. But if
you write:
4 < 5
Markdown will translate it to:
4 < 5
However, inside Markdown code spans and blocks, angle brackets and amper‐
sands are *always* encoded automatically. This makes it easy to use Mark‐
down to write about HTML code. (As opposed to raw HTML, which is a terri‐
ble format for writing about HTML syntax, because every single `<` and
`&` in your example code needs to be escaped.)
Block Elements
Paragraphs and Line Breaks
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" Dtext paragraphs. This differs sig‐
nificantly 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. Mark‐
down's email-style blockquoting
and multi-paragraph list items work best -- and look better -- when you
format them with hard breaks.
Headers
Markdown supports two styles of headers, Setext and atx.
Setext-style headers are ‘underlined’ using equal signs (for first-level
headers) and dashes (for second-level headers). For example:
This is an H1
=============
This is an H2
-------------
Any number of underlining `=`'s or `-`'s will work.
Atx-style headers use 1-6 hash characters at the start of the line, cor‐
responding to header levels 1-6. For example:
# This is an H1
## This is an H2
###### This is an H6
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 H3 ######
Blockquotes
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");
Any decent text editor should make email-style quoting easy. For example,
with BBEdit, you can make a selection and choose Increase Quote Level
from the Text menu.
Lists
Markdown supports ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists.
Unordered lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens -- interchangably --
as list markers:
* Red
* Green
* Blue
is equivalent to:
+ Red
+ Green
+ Blue
and:
- Red
- Green
- Blue
Ordered lists use numbers followed by periods:
1. Bird
2. McHale
3. Parish
It's important to note that the actual numbers you use to mark the list
have no effect on the HTML output Markdown produces. The HTML Markdown
produces from the above list is:
<ol>
<li>Bird</li>
<li>McHale</li>
<li>Parish</li>
</ol>
If you instead wrote the list in Markdown like this:
1. Bird
1. McHale
1. Parish
or even:
3. Bird
1. McHale
8. Parish
you'd get the exact same HTML output. The point is, if you want to, you
can use ordinal numbers in your ordered Markdown lists, so that the num‐
bers in your source match the numbers in your published HTML. But if you
want to be lazy, you don't have to.
If you do use lazy list numbering, however, you should still start the
list with the number 1. At some point in the future, Markdown may support
starting ordered lists at an arbitrary number.
List markers typically start at the left margin, but may be indented by
up to three spaces. List markers must be followed by one or more spaces
or a tab.
To make lists look nice, you can wrap items with hanging indents:
* 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.
But if you want to be lazy, you don't have to:
* 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.
If list items are separated by blank lines, Markdown will wrap the items
in `<p>` tags in the HTML output. For example, this input:
* Bird
* Magic
will turn into:
<ul>
<li>Bird</li>
<li>Magic</li>
</ul>
But this:
* Bird
* Magic
will turn into:
<ul>
<li><p>Bird</p></li>
<li><p>Magic</p></li>
</ul>
List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequent paragraph
in a list item must be intended by either 4 spaces or one tab:
1. This is a list item 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.
2. Suspendisse id sem consectetuer libero luctus
adipiscing.
It looks nice if you indent every line of the subsequent paragraphs, but
here again, Markdown will allow you to be lazy:
* This is a list item with two paragraphs.
This is the second paragraph in the list item.
You're only required to indent the first line. Lorem
ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
* Another item in the same list.
To put a blockquote within a list item, the blockquote's `>` delimiters
need to be indented:
* A list item with a blockquote:
> This is a blockquote
> inside a list item.
To put a code block within a list item, the code block needs to be
indented *twice* -- 8 spaces or two tabs:
* A list item with a code block:
<code goes here>
It's worth noting that it's possible to trigger an ordered list by acci‐
dent, by writing something like this:
1986. What a great season.
In other words, a *number-period-space* sequence at the beginning of a
line. To avoid this, you can backslash-escape the period:
1986\. What a great season.
Code Blocks
Pre-formatted code blocks are used for writing about programming or
markup source code. Rather than forming normal paragraphs, the lines of a
code block are interpreted literally. Markdown wraps a code block in both
`<pre>` and `<code>` tags.
To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the
block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab. For example, given this input:
This is a normal paragraph:
This is a code block.
Markdown will generate:
<p>This is a normal paragraph:</p>
<pre><code>This is a code block.
</code></pre>
One level of indentation -- 4 spaces or 1 tab -- is removed from each
line of the code block. For example, this:
Here is an example of AppleScript:
tell application "Foo"
beep
end tell
will turn into:
<p>Here is an example of AppleScript:</p>
<pre><code>tell application "Foo"
beep
end tell
</code></pre>
A code block continues until it reaches a line that is not indented (or
the end of the article).
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. For example, this:
<div class="footer">
© 2004 Foo Corporation
</div>
will turn into:
<pre><code><div class="footer">
© 2004 Foo Corporation
</div>
</code></pre>
Regular Markdown syntax is not processed within code blocks. E.g., aster‐
isks are just literal asterisks within a code block. This means it's also
easy to use Markdown to write about Markdown's own syntax.
Horizontal Rules
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. Each of the follow‐
ing lines will produce a horizontal rule:
* * *
***
*****
- - -
---------------------------------------
Span Elements
Links
Markdown supports two style of links: inline and reference.
In both styles, 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. For example:
This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.
[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.
Will produce:
<p>This is <a href="http://example.com/" title="Title">
an example</a> inline link.</p>
<p><a href="http://example.net/">This link</a> has no
title attribute.</p>
If you're referring to a local resource on the same server, you can use
relative paths:
See my [About](/about/) page for details.
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.
You can optionally use a space to separate the sets of brackets:
This is [an example] [id] reference-style link.
Then, anywhere in the document, you define your link label like this, on
a line by itself:
[id]: http://example.com/ "Optional Title Here"
That is:
· Square brackets containing the link identifier (optionally indented
from the left margin using up to three spaces);
· followed by a colon;
· followed by one or more spaces (or tabs);
· followed by the URL for the link;
· optionally followed by a title attribute for the link, enclosed in
double or single quotes, or enclosed in parentheses.
The following three link definitions are equivalent:
[foo]: http://example.com/ "Optional Title Here"
[foo]: http://example.com/ 'Optional Title Here'
[foo]: http://example.com/ (Optional Title Here)
Note: There is a known bug in Markdown.pl 1.0.1 which prevents single
quotes from being used to delimit link titles.
The link URL may, optionally, be surrounded by angle brackets:
[id]: <http://example.com/> "Optional Title Here"
You can put the title attribute on the next line and use extra spaces or
tabs for padding, which tends to look better with longer URLs:
[id]: http://example.com/longish/path/to/resource/here
"Optional Title Here"
Link definitions are only used for creating links during Markdown pro‐
cessing, and are stripped from your document in the HTML output.
Link definition names may constist of letters, numbers, spaces, and punc‐
tuation -- but they are not case sensitive. E.g. these two links:
[link text][a]
[link text][A]
are equivalent.
The implicit link name shortcut allows you to omit the name of the link,
in which case the link text itself is used as the name. Just use an
empty set of square brackets -- e.g., to link the word "Google" to the
google.com web site, you could simply write:
[Google][]
And then define the link:
[Google]: http://google.com/
Because link names may contain spaces, this shortcut even works for mul‐
tiple words in the link text:
Visit [Daring Fireball][] for more information.
And then define the link:
[Daring Fireball]: http://daringfireball.net/
Link definitions can be placed anywhere in your Markdown document. I tend
to put them immediately after each paragraph in which they're used, but
if you want, you can put them all at the end of your document, sort of
like footnotes.
Here's an example of reference links in action:
I get 10 times more traffic from [Google] [1] than from
[Yahoo] [2] or [MSN] [3].
[1]: http://google.com/ "Google"
[2]: http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search"
[3]: http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search"
Using the implicit link name shortcut, you could instead write:
I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][] than from
[Yahoo][] or [MSN][].
[google]: http://google.com/ "Google"
[yahoo]: http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search"
[msn]: http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search"
Both of the above examples will produce the following HTML output:
<p>I get 10 times more traffic from <a href="http://google.com/"
title="Google">Google</a> than from
<a href="http://search.yahoo.com/" title="Yahoo Search">Yahoo</a>
or
<a href="http://search.msn.com/" title="MSN Search">MSN</a>.</p>
For comparison, here is the same paragraph written using Markdown's
inline link style:
I get 10 times more traffic from
[Google](http://google.com/ "Google") than from
[Yahoo](http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search") or
[MSN](http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search").
The point of reference-style links is not that they're easier to write.
The point is that with reference-style links, your document source is
vastly more readable. Compare the above examples: using reference-style
links, the paragraph itself is only 81 characters long; with inline-style
links, it's 176 characters; and as raw HTML, it's 234 characters. In the
raw HTML, there's more markup than there is text.
With Markdown's reference-style links, a source document much more
closely resembles the final output, as rendered in a browser. By allowing
you to move the markup-related metadata out of the paragraph, you can add
links without interrupting the narrative flow of your prose.
Emphasis
Markdown treats asterisks (`*`) and underscores (`_`) as indicators of
emphasis. Text wrapped with one `*` or `_` will be wrapped with an HTML
`<em>` tag; double `*`'s or `_`'s will be wrapped with an HTML `<strong>`
tag. E.g., this input:
*single asterisks*
_single underscores_
**double asterisks**
__double underscores__
will produce:
<em>single asterisks</em>
<em>single underscores</em>
<strong>double asterisks</strong>
<strong>double underscores</strong>
You can use whichever style you prefer; the lone restriction is that the
same character must be used to open and close an emphasis span.
Emphasis can be used in the middle of a word:
un*fucking*believable
But if you surround an `*` or `_` with spaces, it'll be treated as a lit‐
eral asterisk or underscore.
To produce a literal asterisk or underscore at a position where it would
otherwise be used as an emphasis delimiter, you can backslash escape it:
\*this text is surrounded by literal asterisks\*
Code
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. For example:
Use the `printf()` function.
will produce:
<p>Use the <code>printf()</code> function.</p>
To include a literal backtick character within a code span, you can use
multiple backticks as the opening and closing delimiters:
``There is a literal backtick (`) here.``
which will produce this:
<p><code>There is a literal backtick (`) here.</code></p>
The backtick delimiters surrounding a code span may include spaces -- one
after the opening, one before the closing. This allows you to place lit‐
eral backtick characters at the beginning or end of a code span:
A single backtick in a code span: `` ` ``
A backtick-delimited string in a code span: `` `foo` ``
will produce:
<p>A single backtick in a code span: <code>`</code></p>
<p>A backtick-delimited string in a code span: <code>`foo`</code></p>
With a code span, ampersands and angle brackets are encoded as HTML enti‐
ties automatically, which makes it easy to include example HTML tags.
Markdown will turn this:
Please don't use any `<blink>` tags.
into:
<p>Please don't use any <code><blink></code> tags.</p>
You can write this:
`—` is the decimal-encoded equivalent of `—`.
to produce:
<p><code>—</code> is the decimal-encoded
equivalent of <code>—</code>.</p>
Images
Admittedly, it's fairly difficult to devise a "natural" syntax for plac‐
ing 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.
Inline image syntax looks like this:
That is:
· An exclamation mark: `!`;
· followed by a set of square brackets, containing the `alt` attribute
text for the image;
· followed by a set of parentheses, containing the URL or path to the
image, an optional `size` attribute (in width c height format) pre‐
fixed with a `=`, and an optional `title` attribute enclosed in dou‐
ble or single quotes.
Reference-style image syntax looks like this:
![Alt text][id]
Where "id" is the name of a defined image reference. Image references are
defined using syntax identical to link references:
[id]: url/to/image =Optional size "Optional title attribute"
Miscellaneous
Automatic Links
Markdown supports a shortcut style for creating "automatic" links for
URLs and email addresses: simply surround the URL or email address with
angle brackets. What this means is that if you want to
show the actual text of a URL or email address, and also have it be
a clickable link, you can do this:
<http://example.com/>
Markdown will turn this into:
<a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>
Automatic links for email addresses work similarly, except that Markdown
will also perform a bit of randomized decimal and hex entity-encoding to
help obscure your address from address-harvesting spambots. For example,
Markdown will turn this:
<address@example.com>
into something like this:
<a href="mailto:addre
ss@example.co
m">address@exa
mple.com</a>
which will render in a browser as a clickable link to
"address@example.com".
(This sort of entity-encoding trick will indeed fool many, if not most,
address-harvesting bots, but it definitely won't fool all of them. It's
better than nothing, but an address published in this way will probably
eventually start receiving spam.)
Backslash Escapes
Markdown allows you to use backslash escapes to generate literal charac‐
ters which would otherwise have special meaning in Markdown's formatting
syntax. For example, if you wanted to surround a word with literal aster‐
isks (instead of an HTML `<em>` tag), you add backslashes before the
asterisks, like this:
\*literal asterisks\*
Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:
backslash
` backtick
* asterisk
_ underscore
curly braces
[] square brackets
() parentheses
# hash mark
+ plus sign
- minus sign (hyphen)
. dot
exclamation mark
BUGS
Markdown assumes that tabs are set to 4 spaces.
AUTHOR
John Gruber http://daringfireball.net/
SEE ALSO
markdown(1), markdown(3), mkd-callbacks(3), mkd-functions(3),
mkd-extensions(7).
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/mirror/setext.html
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/
http://textism.com/tools/textile/
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
http://www.triptico.com/software/grutatxt.html
http://ettext.taint.org/doc/
MASTODON Dec 22, 2007 MASTODON
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