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This tutorial covers how create and format Markdown files.

What is the .md Format?

Markdown is a human readable syntax for formatting text documents. Markdown can be used to produce nicely formatted documents including pdfs, web pages and more. In fact, this web page that you are reading right now is generated from a markdown document!

In this tutorial, we will create a markdown file that documents both who you are and also the project that you might want to work on at the NEON Data Institute.

Markdown Formatting

Markdown is simple plain text, that is styled using symbols, including:

• #: a header element
• **: bold text
• *: italic text
• `: code blocks

Let's review some basic markdown syntax.

Plain Text

Plain text will appear as text in a Markdown document. You can format that text in different ways.

For example, if we want to highlight a function or some code within a plain text paragraph, we can use one backtick on each side of the text ( ), like this: Here is some code. This is the backtick, or grave; not an apostrophe (on most US keyboards it is on the same key as the tilde).

To add emphasis to other text you can use bold or italics.

Have a look at the markdown below:

  The use of the highlight ( `text` ) will be reserved for denoting code.
To add emphasis to other text use **bold** or *italics*.

Notice that this sentence uses a code highlight "``", bold and italics. As a rendered markdown chunk, it looks like this:

The use of the highlight ( text ) will be reserve for denoting code when used in text. To add emphasis to other text use bold or italics.

Horizontal Lines (rules)

Create a rule:

  ***

Below is the rule rendered:

Section Headings

You can create a heading using the pound (#) sign. For the headers to render properly there must be a space between the # and the header text. Heading one is 1 pound sign, heading two is 2 pound signs, etc as follows:

Heading two

## Heading two

Heading three

### Heading three

Heading four

#### Heading four

For a more thorough list of markdown syntax, please read this .

Got questions? No problem. Leave your question in the comment box below. It's likely some of your colleagues have the same question, too! And also likely someone else knows the answer.