Hello everyone
Have you heard of Markdown?
It won’t change your world, but it’s a nice idea and can help.
Markdown is a way to add styling and formatting to a document (so headings, bold, and italics), but those markings are shown in the text. Let me show you some Markdown and then I’ll come back to why you might find this interesting.
Markdown basics
In text using Markdown, every paragraph is separated by two returns.
Bold characters are denoted by two asterisks before and after the text to be emboldened, **thus**.
Italic characters are denoted by a single underscore before and after the italic text, _thus_.
# Six levels of hierarchical headings can be denoted with #hashes at the start of a line followed by a space. A first level heading is denoted with one hash, the second level with two hashes, and so on.
+ List items—and specifically bulleted lists—begin the line with a plus sign followed by a space (and then the rest of the text for the line). As an aside, there is only one return between list items (but a double return before and after the list).
URL links have two elements: the “click here text” and the destination web address. These links are denoted thus: [click here text](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news).
Why Is Markdown Useful?
You might be thinking that you’ve got bold and italics and headings and whatever in Word, your email client, and your other apps, so why would you care about Markdown? If you’ve ever seen an email or a Word document where extracts from several other documents have been cut and paste giving a very wonky result, then you’ll understand the benefit of plain text with Markdown.
And if you’re writing something, by putting your markings in the text, you will know your intent will not be lost if your text is cut and paste or forwarded.
But this isn’t just about email—rather than rely on the formatting features (or lack of formatting features) of any tool in which you’re writing, by using Markdown, you can more clearly express your intent to the reader. And even if the reader doesn’t understand Markdown, then they will likely intuit the markings.
Using Markdown in Practice
…or why do I care about Markdown…
This email was written in Markdown. If you’ve seen my website, all of the pages are written in basic text files using Markdown, and at the press of a button, those pages are automagically converted to the formatting as you see it.
The nice thing with my website is that since I have simple text documents, they’re easy to store/backup, and when I want to change my website, I just tweak a document written using Markdown…I don’t have to get concerned with any computery stuff…
To the Next Level
I’ve only skimmed the surface—there’s a lot more that Markdown can do (and in particular, if you’re worried about images, tables, and formulae, Markdown can handle all of those).
You can write Markdown in any text editor, but there are specialist Markdown editors which offer the advantage of highlighting the markup and facilitating the export of the Markdown in a different format. If you’re interested, one great editor I often use (and which is free) is: Virtual Studio Code).
Can’t I Just Use Word
Of course you can use Word (or whatever other writing tool you use). I still use Word to write novels.
However, once your text is in Word, because of the formatting, it’s a nuisance to get the text out again. So if you’re happy to keep your text in a specific word processor, do that…but if you ever need to get the text out again, then think about Markdown.
Until June
That’s me for this month. I’ll be back in June.
Until then.
All the best
Simon