Draft

Markdown Basics (PARTIAL DRAFT)

Text mark up vs. visual editors

Text markup
Author

Pedro J. Aphalo

Published

2023-05-03

Modified

2023-05-13

Keywords

markdown pkg, knittr pkg, text markup

Note

To see the source of this document click on “</> CODE” to the right of the page title. The page is written using Quarto which is an enhanced version of R Markdown. The diagrams are created with Mermaid, a language inspired by the simplicity of Markdown.

Italics and bold are easily indicated and can be combined.

1 Text mark up

1.1 Italics and bold

The basic idea of markdown as a text mark up language is to make it easy to type a page of text non-stop, by avoiding use of menues and the mouse, or even ctrl-based key combinations. In other words when typing-in content, we only worry about the contents and ignore how the formatted text will look like. Initially, markdown was extremely simple and thus limited. But still entering numbered lists of items or tables was possible.

1.2 Itemized and numbered lists

Although we enter numbers of letters to tell what type of labels we want, their exact values are irrelevant as their sequence is set automatically.

  1. This is the first item.
  2. This is the second item.
  1. This is the first item.
  2. This is the second item.
  • This is the first item.
  • This is the second item.

Nesting is possible

  1. This is the first item.
  2. This is the second item.
    1. This is the first item.
    2. This is the second item.
Caution

Empty lines and indentation are a meaningful part of the mark up, and can be confusing at first.

1.3 Tables

Coming soon…