Hey everyone, I figured that some new users might not know that comments and posts have a formatting standard called Markdown.
In simple terms, Markdown is a (semi)universal language that uses formatting symbols to give a certain style to a portion of text.
This quick guide can help you to write in a way that’s more appealing and easy to read.
FORMATTING | SYNTAX | EXAMPLE |
---|---|---|
New line | put two spaces at the end of the line you want to break | Line__ |
New paragraph | return two times at the end of the paragraph | Line↵↵ |
Horizontal rule | between each paragraph put three “-” or “*” | *** |
Bold | put your text between two “**” or “__” | **Bold** or __Bold__ |
Italic | put your text between two “*” or “_” | *Italic* or _Italic_ |
Subscript | put your text between two “~” | ~Subscript~ |
Superscript | put your text between two “^” | ^Superscript^ |
Inline code |
put your text between two “`” | `sudo rm -rf /` |
Headings and Titles | put one or more “#” at the beginning of the line | # Headings for level 1, ## Headings for level 2… |
Blockquotes | put “>” at the beginning of the line | > Blockquote |
Links | put the the text between [ ] and the link between ( ) | [Links]( https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ ) |
Images | like links but you put “!” before the first square bracket | ![Images]( https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/fa6d9660-4f1f-4e90-ac73-b897216db6f3.png?format=webp&thumbnail=96 ) |
You can also do unordered lists using “-” at the beginning of each line:
- Salt
- Potatoes
- Beans
will become
- Salt
- Potatoes
- Beans
Or ordered list by putting “1.” at the beginning of each line:
1. Salt
2. Potatoes
3. Beans
will become
- Salt
- Potatoes
- Beans
You can save other users from spoilers by encasing a paragraph between a section that starts with ":::" followed by a space and the word “spoiler” + the title of the spoiler and ends with “:::”. The spoiler will be hidden inside a menu and you’ll be able to see it if you click on it
::: spoiler warning! spoiler!
the butler did it
:::
will become
warning! spoiler!
the butler did it
In the end you can also format big code blocks by putting “```” at the beginning and at the end of each paragraph
```
println(“Hello World!”)
```
will become
println("Hello World!")
Last but not least remember that you can always use break formatting syntax by putting “\” in front of a character:
so if I want “^” in my text without having the rest of the paragraph in superscript, I’m simply going to write “\^”
Now go and have fun!
Just want to plug markdown as a phenomenal resource. You can use it to write documentation both online and offline, and with pandoc you can even use it to create beautiful PDF documents from your computer. Here’s some places I use markdown daily, some additional resources, and tips
- GitHub parses markdown files from their web UI by default
- Obsidian uses markdown for their note taking application
- Pandoc can convert Markdown files to other formats including PDF
- Because it’s plaintext, there are fewer formatting errors when moving between applications and you don’t even need an application to read them
- Plaintext also means documents can be easily tracked via source control
- Lemmy and Reddit both use Markdown
- Discord uses a variation of Markdown
No way to do inline spoilers?