How to learn about Markdown to format posts in this forum

What is Markdown?

Discourse, the software used for this forum, uses Markdown to format posts. You can also format posts using HTML and BB (bulletin board) codes but Markdown is preferred wherever possible.

Markdown is simple text formatting in text codes that you can edit in your text. In other words, Markdown is:

a simple way to format text that looks great on any device. It doesn’t do anything fancy like change the font size, color, or type — just the essentials, using keyboard symbols you already know.

and

a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet.

Discourse aims to comply with Commonmark

Those quotes is taken from the Commonmark website because Commonmark is the Markdown standard that Discourse is working to comply with.

At present Discourse is not fully compliant with the Commonmark specification but expects to be by 2018.

So until there is complete compliance there will be some discrepencies between Commonmark and Discourse.

Where can I learn Markdown?

The Commonmark website has a quick reference card with examples with links to a ten-minute tutorial and the specification.

You can also learn Markdown by looking at the examples in How to format How-To Topics for the GlassWire forum


:pencil2: How to improve this How-To

This is a wiki post, like all the other How-To topics, so feel free to improve the content. Just leave a reply explaining what you’ve done and why it makes sense to do it that way.


1 Like