Markdown for Beginners

Rich text is the worst. It's great in theory—after all, it's often nice to add italics to text, link to websites, and break up longer pieces with headers, images, and quotes. But if you've ever copied formatted text from Word into WordPress, or opened a Pages document in Google Docs and lost all formatting, you'll be keenly aware that rich text is fragile and apt to break.

So, Markdown. It's a plain text syntax where you add asterisks and hashtags to text, and they're magically turned into the correct italics and headers when you export your file as a PDF or post it on your website. And since it's plain text, it works everywhere—even if an app doesn't support Markdown, it's still obvious what's what with the asterisks and hashtags.

It's how I format everything I write, in iA Writer and Kirby and on Zapier's blog. And it's the one syntax you should learn if you aren't writing in Markdown already.

This guide to getting started with Markdown should help.

Continue reading at https://zapier.com/blog/beginner-ultimate-guide-markdown/

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