Markdown-syntax has already crossed my path both when producing reproducible reports using Jupyter and R Markdown notebooks.

To check it’s features a bit more comprehensively I decided to make an exercise out of it and go through a detailed blog-post that I found on ghost.org. The article is called How to Write Faster, Better & Longer: The Ultimate Guide to Markdown. Below will find all the snippets that I tried out myself while going through their article:

The quick brown fox, jumped over the lazy dog.

Porchetta short loin chicken shoulder pork belly swine. Ground round biltong alcatra sausage pastrami kielbasa tenderloin filet mignon frankfurter capicola leberkas beef pig pork belly. Flank pork prosciutto sausage shankle shoulder swine burgdoggen drumstick. Turkey leberkas pancetta meatball porchetta ribeye buffalo sausage corned beef cupim meatloaf. Shoulder picanha burgdoggen spare ribs, kevin pastrami alcatra jowl kielbasa ground round turkey hamburger ribeye andouille tenderloin. Jerky rump kielbasa, pastrami tri-tip salami tenderloin short ribs meatloaf turducken beef ribs tail jowl.

Basic Markdown Formatting

Here are the elements we’ll use most often:

Headings

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Text

italic bold bold-italic link

Images

Unordered Lists

• Milk
• Bread
  • Wholegrain
• Butter

Ordered Lists

1. Tidy the kitchen
2. Prepare ingredients
3. Cook delicious things

Quotes

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Intermediate Markdown Formatting

Horizontal Rules

Code Snippets

Some text with an inline code snippet.

Indenting by 4 spaces will turn an entire paragraph into a code-block (further down we will learn how to specify the language for a proper syntax-highlighing:

.my-link {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

Reference Lists & Titles

The quick brown fox, jumped over the lazy dog.

Anywhere we use a URL, we can follow it with a "title in quotation marks" to generate a title attribute.

Dog

Escaping

*literally*

Escaping Markdown characters with a back-slash \ allows us to use any characters which might be getting accidentally converted into HTML.

Embedding HTML

Big Fat Button

Possibly the coolest feature of Markdown is that it also just supports plain old HTML.

So we can drop in any HTML, sharing button JavaScript snipped or iFrame we like and it will work on the page just as normal.

Advanced Markdown

Every example so far has been vanilla, normal Markdown. Those code snippets will work absolutely anywhere which supports Markdown syntax.

Now we are going to look at some syntax which is not standard to native Markdown (i.e., they are extensions of the language).

Strike-throughs (we have to use the html-way of doing it here)

Highlights (we have to use the html-way of doing it here)

ooooh fancy

Automatic Links (works)

https://ghost.org

Markdown Footnotes (works)

The quick brown fox¹ jumped over the lazy dog².

Syntax Highlighting

import sqlite3

class Database:

    def __init__(self, db):
        self.conn = sqlite3.connect(db)
        self.cur=self.conn.cursor()
        self.cur.execute("CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS book (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, title text, author text, year integer, isbn integer)")
        self.conn.commit()
        # conn.close()

Another example using JavaScript Code:

// This .js-document is part of the udemy-class called "The Complete Web-Developer Bootcamp".
console.log("PRINT ALL NUMBERS BETWEEN -10 AND 19");
var num = -10;
while(num < 20){
    console.log(num);
    num++;
}

Converting HTML to Markdown

A very handy tool comes from Dom Christie which easily allows you to convert HTML to Markdown.

Best Markdown Apps

Writing in Markdown also easily allows you to export to HTML, PDF, or a wide variety of document types.

Some of the coolest Markdown editors for Mac, PC, desktop and mobile are:

Mac OSX Markdown Editors

• Mou
• iA Writer
• Desk
• ByWord
• SublimeText

Windows PC Markdown Editors

• WriteMonkey
• MarkdownPad
• Texts
• SublimeText

Apple iOS Markdown Apps

• Werdsmith
• iA Writer
• ByWord