Markdown basics — a 10-minute cheat sheet

Markdown is a way of formatting text with a few ordinary characters. You can write it in any text editor, and it reads naturally even before it’s rendered. GitHub, Obsidian, Notion, many blogging platforms and documentation sites all use it.

Headings

Start a line with # followed by a space. More # means a smaller heading.

# Biggest heading
## Second-level heading
### Third-level heading

Paragraphs and line breaks

Separate paragraphs with a blank line. Lines without a blank line between them join into one paragraph. To break a line inside a paragraph, end it with two spaces.

Emphasis

**bold**   *italic*   ~~strikethrough~~   `code`

Result: bold, italic, strikethrough, code

Lists

- Apples
- Bananas
  - Indent sub-items by two or more spaces

1. First
2. Second

Links and images

[FreeConvertter](https://freeconvertter.com)
![Description of the picture](images/logo.png)

An image is a link with ! in front; the parentheses hold the image’s path or address.

Quotes

> A quoted sentence.

Code blocks

Wrap code in three backticks. Everything inside is shown exactly as typed.

```
npm install
npm run dev
```

Tables

| Item | Price |
| --- | ---: |
| Apples | 1.20 |
| Bananas | 0.80 |

The --- row separates the header from the body; a colon on the right, ---:, right-aligns the column.

Horizontal rules

A line containing only --- (after a blank line) draws a divider.

Converting Markdown to other formats

You want to…	Converter
View or share it as a web page	Markdown to HTML
Hand in a Word document	Markdown to DOCX
Read or publish it as an e-book	Markdown to EPUB
Keep just the text, without symbols	Markdown to TXT

Write course notes in Markdown, convert them to EPUB, and your # headings become the book’s chapters.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting the space after # — #Heading isn’t a heading.
• No blank line before a list, so it sticks to the previous paragraph.
• Table rows with different numbers of cells.

Summary

# for headings, ** for bold, - for lists and []() for links cover most documents. To move existing Word files into Markdown, see How to convert Word documents to Markdown.