% Quick Introduction to Markdown % Niraj Dudani % January 2, 2013

Introduction

This document is written in Markdown¹. Here is the philosophy behind this format:

A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

For MOOSE documentation, we use Pandoc² to convert from Markdown to HTML. Pandoc adds some nice things to Markdown, like tables and footnotes.

Converting to HTML

To convert this document to HTML, run the command in the build script included in this directory. This command also requests pandoc to generate a table-of-contents for this document.

To install pandoc on Ubuntu, simply issue:

sudo apt-get install pandoc

Examples

In the following subsections, we look at a few examples.

Lists, emphasis, etc.

This is a bullet-list of some things that Markdown can do:

• This is emphasis.

• This is stronger emphasis.

• You can add ^superscript^ / subscript / strikeout.

• You can add verbatim text inline. This is useful for variables, functions(), etc.

Quoting text, code, etc.

To quote text, use >, as in email:

Rock Story
\ -- Dik Browne

LE: What crazy mixed-up rocks!
HH: Quiet, stupid!

HH: You're in a very special place... Full of age and mystery...
LE: No kidding!

LE: Wow! Crazy! What is it?
HH: It's a monument!

HH: Thousands of people slaved for years to drag those stones here and put them in place!
LE: Why?

HH: For their leader! When you're a big shot, you do that so people will always remember you!
\ \ \ \ That's called immortality!
LE: Wow!

LE: Who was he?
HH: Nobody knows...

If you're lazy, a single > is enough:

The Purist
\ \ -- Ogden Nash

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

At any time,
end lines with
2 spaces
to retain
line-endings (as done in the examples above).

Insert code using 4 spaces:

echo "Sanitizing..."
rm -rf /

or a few tildes:

def factorial( n ):
    if ( n <= 1 ):
        return 1
    else:
        return n * factorial( n - 1 )

Linking, images and tables

You can link to an external website, or to a section on the same page.

You can insert images and have captions for them. Here an image has been sandwiched between 2 horizontal rules:

Tables can have headers:

Right Left Center Default

 12     12        12            12
123     123       123          123
  1     1          1             1

or not:

♜ ♞ ♝ ♛ ♚ ♝ ♞ ♜ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ◼ ◻ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♖ ♘ ♗ ♕ ♔ ♗ ♘ ♖

Conclusion

Markdown and Pandoc have many more features. For these, go to the links in the footnotes.

Footnotes