Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid HTML.

Markdown live preview

Markdown makes it quick and simple to mark up plain text that can be rendered (usually into HTML via something like Pandoc). One benefit is that the source file remains rather readable when compared to, say, reading raw HTML code.

Consider:

| Left columns | Right columns |
| ------------- |:-------------:|
| left foo | right foo |
| left bar | right bar |
| left baz | right baz |

Gets you:

Left columns	Right columns
left foo	right foo
left bar	right bar
left baz	right baz

But trying to read:

<table>
<thead><tr><td><strong>Left columns</strong></td><td align=center><strong>Right columns</strong></td></tr></thead>
<tr><td>Left foo</td><td align=center>right foo</td></tr>
<tr><td>Left bar</td><td align=center>right bar</td></tr>
<tr><td>Left baz</td><td align=center>right baz</td></tr>
</table>

Left columns	Right columns
Left foo	right foo
Left bar	right bar
Left baz	right baz

Same output…but Markdown is easier to read as source code.

obsidian uses Markdown natively and all of the notes it creates on disk are stored as Markdown, making it easy to interact with them in any normal text editor or via code or command line utilities. It makes it easy for me to write scripts that can read Obsidian notes, modify pieces of existing notes or create whole new Markdown notes.

Backlinks

• Colophon
• Pandoc