Markdown Syntax Summary

An overview of Markdown syntax, refactored from http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html.

Markdown is a minimal syntax set, designed to make it easy to write and edit your prose. You can use HTML tags whenever you need to.

Markdown syntax cannot be used within block-level HTML.

Span-level HTML tags -- e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> -- can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header.

Overview

More examples

> This is a blockquote with one paragraph. Each line begins
> with an arrow.

> Another blockquote, but only one arrow at the beginning.
Don't actually need more.

> This is the first level of quoting.
>
> > This is a nested blockquote.
> 
> Back to the first level.

* An unordered list
+ With mismatching bullets
- Still works

1. An ordered list
23. Just needs to begin with 1.

This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.
[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.
See my [About](/about/) page for a relative path.

[An example][id] reference-style link.
[An example] [id] reference-style link with a space.
[An example][] reference-style link, with an implied id of "An example". 

Reference links require link definitions, which can take several forms:

[id]: http://example.com/  "Optional Title Here"
[id]: http://example.com/  'Optional Title Here'
[id]: http://example.com/  (Optional Title Here)
[id]: <http://example.com/>  "Optional Title Here"
[id]: http://example.com/longish/path/to/resource/here
    "Optional Title Here"

Reference links are case-insensitive.

Image links:

![Alt text, inline](/path/to/img.jpg)
![Alt text, inline](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title")

![Alt text, reference-style][id]
[id]: url/to/image  "Optional title attribute"

Additional notes

Lists

Separate list items with blank lines if you want each item to be enclosed in a <p> tag.

List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequent paragraph in a list item must be indented by either 4 spaces or one tab.

To avoid an accidental list by a number at the start of a line, you can backslash-escape the period:

1986\\. What a great season.

Blockquotes

A Markdown "indent" is 4 spaces or one tab.

To put a blockquote within a list item, the blockquote's > delimiters need to be indented.

Code blocks

To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab.

To put a code block within a list item, the code block needs to be indented twice -- 8 spaces or two tabs.

Special characters

Use a backslash to escape:

    \   backslash
    `   backtick
    *   asterisk
    _   underscore
    {}  curly braces
    []  square brackets
    ()  parentheses
    #   hash mark
    +   plus sign
    -   minus sign (hyphen)
    .   dot
    !   exclamation mark

You'll also want to read the original, full Markdown syntax here.

On this site, I'm actually using pymarkdown, a pyblosxom plugin.

Here's another python implementation of Markdown. This is exciting because you can use extensions.

You can convert Markdown to formats besides HTML with other programs. Like Pandoc.

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML, groff man, and S5 HTML slide shows.

I haven't tried Pandoc yet, but since I went to the trouble to install Haskell to get it working, I thought I'd mention it. :)

</http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html>