Text Formatting

Headings, paragraphs, emphasis, line breaks — these look like the simplest syntax there is, yet they are the part of Markdown people most often get wrong.

A common mistake is to separate paragraphs with a blank line but accidentally add a few extra spaces, or to use three or more spaces instead of a blank line to force a line break, and then wonder why the rendered output never changes. The reason is that Markdown’s parsing rules depend on how much you indent and where the blank lines sit, and these details are hard to guess at without reading the specification. This chapter puts the exact syntax of every construct, its common misuses, and the corresponding rendered result side by side, so you get the basics right in one pass.

Typography is the first impression a document makes. Get this chapter right and everything that follows will be much easier to present.