A general background to Markdown

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a special type of language that can be used to create formatted text within a text editor. The concept of Markdown was created by John Gruber in 2004. Unlike programming languages which execute commands, Markdown is used to define the appearance and structure of text. It has a dedicated set of annotation sytnax (e.g. symbols) that can be used to control the formatting of text, from defining headers and boldening words, to adding hyperlinks and creating lists. While the annotation syntax is visible in the Markdown document itself, it does not actually show up in the outputted version of the document. Instead, the annotation syntax gets processed as instructions that dictate how the output content is displayed.

Why use Markdown?

Markdown offers several broad advantages, such as:

Benefit	Summary
Simplicity	Markdown syntax is very easy to read, write and learn
Speed	Markdown syntax can be implemeneted quickly and efficiently
Portability	Markdown files are lightweight and can be opened and edited on any device
Compatability	Markdown is supported natively by many platforms, including GitHub, Jupyter Notebooks, R/RStudio and documentation generators
Convertability	Markdown can be easilty converted into other common file formats such as HTML (for websites), PDF (for print), DOCX (for Word documents), and PPT (for Powerpoint slides)