Markdown Getting Started

Markdown is a syntax for writing structured documents in plain text. It costs almost nothing to learn, and the result can be source code, a version-controllable file, and a rendered web page all at once.

This chapter answers the two most basic questions: what Markdown actually is, and how it relates to HTML; and why you should use it instead of writing raw HTML or using a rich-text editor. The answers to those two questions determine which conventions every later chapter has to follow — in particular, which whitespace characters must never appear inside Markdown, the pitfall that trips up beginners more often than any other.

By the end of this chapter you should be able to tell whether a given file is Markdown, and explain why it suits a version-control repository better than HTML does.