Markdown is a way of formatting text which is intended to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write. It uses standard punctuation characters to determine what kind of styling to apply to different elements. Using markdown gives you control over how your text is presented without the overhead of learning a complicated markup language such as HTML.

Most description fields in the Marketplacer system use markdown so getting familiar with the basics is worth your time.

This article covers the following topics.

• Headers
• Emphasis
• Lists
• Images
• Links
• Embedding

 

Headers

Headers are denoted using a hash (#) symbol. You can specify different header levels by changing the number of hashes. Here are some examples.

# Top-level header

will render as

## Second-level header

will render as

### Third-level header 

will render as

The sixth-level header is reserved for making links look like buttons. 

###### [Shop All Dog Products](/s/for-dogs)

will render as a button that uses your site colours.

Emphasis

You can incorporate italic text into your writing by placing *s around the word(s) you want to italicise.

This is *italic* text

will render as:

You can also use bold text by surrounding the text with **.

This is **bold** text

will render as:

And if you want to use bold and italics together, use ***.

This is ***bold and italic*** text

will render as:

Lists

You can use bulleted lists by putting each list item on a new line and prefixing it with a * followed by a space.

* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3
    * Item 4
    * Item 5

will render as

To embed a numbered list, start the line with 1. instead.

1. Item 1
1. Item 2
1. Item 3
    1. Item 4
    1. Item 5

will render as

Images

Embedding an image requires you to provide alternative text and the URL of the image you want to embed.

![Marketplacer logo](http://marketplacer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Marketplacer-M-Logo.png)

will render as

Links

Links are created by using square and round brackets.

Visit the [Marketplacer website](https://marketplacer.com/) today!

will render as

To create an image within a link, combine the two.

[![M Logo](http://marketplacer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Marketplacer-M-Logo.png)](https://marketplacer.com)

will render as

Embedding

You can also embed YouTube videos into your page using the !yt directive.

!yt(https://youtu.be/CBusN8rd36k)

will render as