Markdown First Steps ⭐

Note: This is an early excerpt from my upcoming Markdown book. –Paul
When I was in college, I worked nights at The Patriot Ledger, a Boston-area newspaper, doing paste-up, a pre-digital process by which each page of the next day's paper was constructed on a board using strips of wax-dipped paper containing blocks of text and images. The wax held the strips of paper on the board, and I would crop, edit, and arrange each to create the layout of the page.

Many times, the blocks of text that made up an article were too long to fit within the space provided by a page's layout. In these cases, I would call an editor over so they could scan the article and use a pencil to draw red lines across the sections of text I should remove to make it fit within the available space. That is, the editor would mark up the text to indicate their intentions.

In the digital era, we have markup languages like XML and HTML that use specific syntax to indicate the structure and formatting of text in the documents created with these languages. The markup is syntax that describes intent, like the way a word should be formatted, perhaps with a bold or italic effect.
Markdown is modern, lightweight, and simple
Markdown is not a language. It's a lightweight syntax added to plain text documents that indicates structure and formatting similarly to--but more simply than--XML and HTML. In the words of its creator, John Gruber, Markdown is a writing format, which separates it from publishing formats like HTML. It's input, not output.

Indeed, the name Markdown is a play on words that describes its design. Where XML and HTML are markup languages designed to be machine-readable, Markdown is a simpler form of markup designed to be both machine-readable and human-readable. Yes, XML and HTML can be read and understood by people, at least after some training. But Markdown is immediately and easily read and understood by people.

This is true because Markdown syntax consists of just a handful of specific characters called symbols that indicate structure and formatting. The writer can ignore that markup early in the writing process if desired because they can easily and even naturally mark up the plain text with those symbols as needed. And the the resulting lightly marked-up text is easily understood by the writer and others who may read the document.

Optionally, text editors and other apps can also render Markdown-format text documents in HTML so that the structure and formatting displays using visual styles that make the document more attractive to readers than plain text with markup. And some Markdown editors even provide a word processor-like WYSIWYG mode that combines the text, markup, and formatting in a single view you can edit in real time.
Markdown flavors
Markdown is simple by design, but this simplicity means that it's not a full replacement for HTML or other forms of published output, like a PDF or EPUB file. There are formatting and structural features in...