Introductory Markdown

This is a short introduction to Markdown, a pre-requisite to GitHub and Literate programming tools (Jupyter, R Notebooks).

Introduction

Markdown a plain text formatting syntax; and a software tool that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. Any text editor can be used to prepare markdown documents but needs a markdown software to convert it. Markdown editors, however, have an inbuilt conversion tool. Rstudio can convert markdown to a variety of formats, including HTML, pdf.

For the purpose of this training, we will use the online editor for editing and rendering.

Markdown Syntax

We will use the Markdown Here Cheatsheet materials to learn the basic syntax. See also: https://commonmark.org/help/.

Try it yourself

Spend the next 10 minutes working through this exercise to gauge your ability to write documents in markdown.