7 guides

Markdown guides & tutorials

Everything we know about writing in Markdown — from the basics to exporting a finished document. Written for people who write, not just for developers.

Guide

Markdown Guide

A complete, practical Markdown guide with every syntax element and a printable cheat sheet — headings, lists, links, images, tables, code, task lists and more.

6 min read

Best Markdown Editor for Mac

What to look for in a Markdown editor for Mac — live preview, native performance, export to PDF and EPUB, LaTeX math and diagrams — and how Inkiostro compares.

4 min read

Basics

What Is Markdown?

What Markdown is, how it works, and why writers, students and developers prefer it over Word — the benefits of plain-text writing, explained simply.

5 min read

Background

History of Markdown

The history of Markdown, from John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004 to CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown — how a simple idea became the web's writing format.

4 min read

How-to

Markdown to PDF

How to convert Markdown to a polished PDF — with headers, footers, page numbers and margins. A simple step-by-step method on Mac, iPad and iPhone.

4 min read

Math in Markdown

Write beautiful math in Markdown using LaTeX syntax — inline and block equations rendered with KaTeX. Syntax, examples and how to export equations to PDF.

3 min read

Diagrams in Markdown

Create flowcharts, sequence and other diagrams in Markdown using Mermaid — draw with plain text instead of a mouse. Syntax, examples and how to export them.

4 min read