The power of markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. Explore the power of it !
1 minute
Markdown is, just like HTML a markup language, it's the language you might know from the README.md in almost every open source Github repository.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that 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.
Markdown is extremely easy to write, it has no tags and with a very little of markup knowledge you can write all your texts. It's also extremely simple to transform markdown to html.
So markdown is the perfect language for writing prose. It's the perfect tool for writing blogs like this or books.
Markdown is mainly used to create documentation. It's a simple text format with simple markup. That format can easily be transformed into html and styled with css. So it's often used for website creation or e-book creation, all because of its simplicity and ease of use.
If you're reading this blogpost, well, then you are actually reading markdown. This site is almost completely markdown driven. The markdown files are a simple format to write in, and it has te possibility to serve information in a multi-purpose way.
On this site I'm using spatie/laravel-markdown to convert the markdown files to html. The meta information added to the markdown files is parsed with spatie/yaml-front-matter. Mohammed Said, a core member of the Laravel team has written a library called Ibis, this library makes it possible to convert your markdown to a pdf book.
Markdown has some simple tags like # , ### for headings , ** for bold text * for italic text. A complete overview of these tags can be found on this site!
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