A markup language#

A markup language is a system for annotating text documents in order to e.g. define formatting. HTML, if you are familiar with that, is an example of a markup language. HTML uses tags, such as:

Example in HTML

<h1>Heading</h1>
<h2>Sub-heading</h2>
<a href="www.webpage.com">Link</a>
<ul>
  <li>List-item1</li>
  <li>List-item2</li>
  <li>List-item3</li>
</ul>

and this is the result :

Heading

Sub-heading

Link

List-item1
List-item2
List-item3

Markdown#

Markdown is a lightweight markup language which uses plain-text syntax in order to be as unobtrusive as possible, so that a human can easily read it. The code below gives the same result as the HTML code shown above :

Example in markdown

# Heading

## Sub-heading

### Another deeper heading

A [link](http://example.com).

Text attributes _italic_, *italic*, **bold**, `monospace`.

Bullet list:

  * apples
  * oranges
  * pears

A markdown document can be converted to other formats, such as HTML or PDF, for viewing in a browser or a PDF reader. For example, the page you are reading right now is written in markdown. Markdown is somewhat ill-defined, and as a consequence of that there exist many implementations and extensions, although they share most of the syntax. R Markdown is one such implementation/extension.

A large number of sites give you the full syntax of Markdonw. Below is a cheat sheet proposed by GitHUb :