Markdown Notes

Table of Contents

Section 1: Introduction

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents.

In an application like Microsoft Word, you click buttons to format words and phrases, and the changes are visible immediately. Markdown isn’t like that. When you create a Markdown-formatted file, you add Markdown syntax to the text to indicate which words and phrases should look different.

Additionally, since Markdown is a lightweight markup language, its appearance (fonts, colors, link colors) might vary from site to site. For example, despite many things on the Emperor's Hammer being written in Markdown, it looks different than Discord, which also uses a version of Markdown. (Note that Discord uses a stripped-down version of Markdown which does not support many of the features discussed in this course.)

Why Use Markdown?

You might be wondering why people use Markdown instead of rich text editors such as Word. Why write with Markdown when you can press buttons in an interface to format your text?

There are several reasons for this:

  • Markdown can be used for everything. People use it to create websites, documents, notes, etc.
  • Markdown is portable. Files containing Markdown-formatted text can be opened using virtually any application.
  • Markdown is platform independent.
  • Markdown is future proof. Even if the application you’re using stops working at some point in the future, you’ll still be able to read your Markdown-formatted text using a text editing application.
  • Markdown is everywhere. Websites like Reddit and GitHub support Markdown, and lots of desktop and web-based applications support it.
  • Markdown is the primary text markup language used by the Emperor’s Hammer database. Officers use it to write reports, it is used in new posts, and has even been used to write these course notes!

Markdown also allows for additional functionality to be implemented through the integration of snippets of HTML code. However, this is not supported by the Emperor’s Hammer database. The use of HTML snippets also varies by Markdown interpreter/processor, so HTML features available on one might not be available on others. This is beyond the scope of this course, but there are many good resources available online for those looking to utilize more advanced features of Markdown.