Paragraphs, Headers, Blockquotes

A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines. (A blank line is any line that looks like a blank line — a line containing nothing but spaces or tabs is considered blank.) Normal paragraphs should not be indented with spaces or tabs.

Markdown offers two styles of headers: Setext and atx. Setext-style headers for <h1> and <h2> are created by “underlining” with equal signs (=) and hyphens (-), respectively. To create an atx-style header, you put 1-6 hash marks (#) at the beginning of the line — the number of hashes equals the resulting HTML header level.

A First Level Header
====================

A Second Level Header
---------------------

Now is the time for all good men to come to
the aid of their country. This is just a
regular paragraph.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy
dog's back.

### Header 3

> This is a blockquote.
>
> This is the second paragraph in the blockquote.
>
> ## This is an H2 in a blockquote

Output:

---

A First Level Header

A Second Level Header

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. This is just a regular paragraph.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

Header 3

This is a blockquote.

This is the second paragraph in the blockquote.

This is an H2 in a blockquote

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Phrase Emphasis

Markdown uses asterisks and underscores to indicate spans of emphasis.

Markdown:

Some of these words *are emphasized*.
Some of these words _are emphasized also_.

Use two asterisks for **strong emphasis**.
Or, if you prefer, __use two underscores instead__.

Output:

---

Some of these words are emphasized. Some of these words are emphasized also.

Use two asterisks for strong emphasis. Or, if you prefer, use two underscores instead.

---

Lists

Unordered (bulleted) lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens (*, +, and -) as list markers. These three markers are interchangable; this:

*   Candy.
*   Gum.
*   Booze.

this:

+   Candy.
+   Gum.
+   Booze.

and this:

-   Candy.
-   Gum.
-   Booze.

all produce the same output:

---

• Candy.
• Gum.
• Booze.

---

Ordered (numbered) lists use regular numbers, followed by periods, as list markers:

1.  Red
2.  Green
3.  Blue

Output:

---

1. Red
2. Green
3. Blue

---

If you put blank lines between items, you’ll get

tags for the list item text. You can create multi-paragraph list items by indenting the paragraphs by 4 spaces or 1 tab:

*   A list item.

    With multiple paragraphs.

*   Another item in the list.

Output:

---

• A list item.

  With multiple paragraphs.

• Another item in the list.

---

Links

Markdown supports two styles for creating links: inline and reference. With both styles, you use square brackets to delimit the text you want to turn into a link.

Inline-style links use parentheses immediately after the link text. For example:

This is an [example link](http://example.com/).

Output:

---

This is an example link.

---

Optionally, you may include a title attribute in the parentheses:

This is an [example link](http://example.com/ "With a Title").

Output:

---

This is an example link.

---

Reference-style links allow you to refer to your links by names, which you define elsewhere in your document:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][1] than from [Yahoo][2] or [MSN][3].

[1]: http://google.com/        "Google"
[2]: http://search.yahoo.com/  "Yahoo Search"
[3]: http://search.msn.com/    "MSN Search"

Output:

---

I get 10 times more traffic from Google than from Yahoo or MSN.

---

The title attribute is optional. Link names may contain letters, numbers and spaces, but are not case sensitive:

I start my morning with a cup of coffee and [The New York Times][NY Times].

[ny times]: http://www.nytimes.com/

Output:

---

I start my morning with a cup of coffee and The New York Times.

---

Images

Image syntax is very much like link syntax.

Inline (titles are optional):

![alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Title")

Reference-style:

![alt text][id]

[id]: /path/to/img.jpg "Title"

Both of the above examples produce the same output:

---

---

Code

In a regular paragraph, you can create code span by wrapping text in backtick quotes. Any ampersands (&) and angle brackets (< or >) will automatically be translated into HTML entities. This makes it easy to use Markdown to write about HTML example code:

I strongly recommend against using any `<blink>` tags.

I wish SmartyPants used named entities like `&mdash;` instead of decimal-encoded entites like `&#8212;`.

Output:

---

I strongly recommend against using any <blink> tags.

I wish SmartyPants used named entities like — instead of decimal-encoded entites like —.

---

To specify an entire block of pre-formatted code, indent every line of the block by 4 spaces or 1 tab. Just like with code spans, &, <, and > characters will be escaped automatically.

Markdown:

If you want your page to validate under XHTML 1.0 Strict, you've got to put paragraph tags in your blockquotes:
    <blockquote>
        <p>For example.</p>
    </blockquote>

Output:

---

If you want your page to validate under XHTML 1.0 Strict, you've got to put paragraph tags in your blockquotes:

<blockquote>
    <p>For example.</p>
</blockquote>

---