Markdown for writers: every mark you need on one page

Markdown is a way of writing format into plain text with a few ordinary characters. Two stars round a word make it bold. A hash at the start of a line makes a heading. The file stays plain text that any app on any computer can open, now and in 30 years, and a word processor or a converter turns the marks into real format when you need it.

This page has every mark a writer needs, and nothing else. Retroprose keeps every document as Markdown, so it is also a guide to what is underneath your writing there.

The marks at a glance

The rest of this page explains each one, and the few rules that catch people out.

Paragraphs

A paragraph is a run of text with a blank line above and below it. That blank line matters: two lines with no blank line between them are read as one paragraph, joined with a space. So leave a blank line between paragraphs, as you would leave a gap on a typed page.

Headings

Start a line with one hash and a space for a heading 1, two for a heading 2 and three for a heading 3:

# The long night

## Part one

### The station

Markdown allows six levels, but three are all a piece of writing needs, and they are the three Retroprose shows. Use heading 1 for chapter titles, or for the title of a short piece, and the others for the parts inside. Exports turn them into real headings, so a Word file gets its own heading styles and a contents list can be built from them.

Bold and italic

Two stars on each side make bold, and one star on each side makes italic:

It was **not** an accident. She had read the letter *twice*.

The Markdown standard calls single stars emphasis, and every export shows it as italic. Underscores work too (_words_), but stars are easier to read, and they are what Retroprose writes. Markdown has no underline, and neither does Retroprose: use italic or bold instead.

The retro screens in Retroprose show italic as underlined text in another colour, as the screens of the 1980s could not slope their letters. The paper screen shows true italic. Either way, the exports are italic.

Lists

Start each item with a hyphen and a space for a bullet list, or a number, a full stop and a space for a numbered list:

- Bread
- Milk
- Stamps

1. Write the first draft
2. Leave it a week
3. Read it aloud

In a numbered list only the first number counts. The rest are numbered in order however you typed them, so moving an item never means renumbering the others. In Retroprose, Enter at the end of an item starts the next one, and Enter on an empty item ends the list.

Quotes and indented paragraphs

A greater-than sign and a space at the start of a paragraph indents it, for a quotation or a letter within a story:

> I have not been able to sleep since Tuesday.

The Article template of the exports turns each one into a pull quote.

Lines and page breaks

Three hyphens on a line of their own draw a line across the page. In a novel, it is the usual mark for a break between scenes.

Leave a blank line above the three hyphens. Without it, Markdown takes the line of text above as a heading, which is one of its oldest surprises. Retroprose adds the blank lines for you when you use Layout, Horizontal line.

\newpage on a line of its own starts a new page in Word, OpenDocument and PDF exports. It is not part of the Markdown standard, so some other Markdown apps show it as it is, but it is short and plain, and Retroprose reads it.

Tables

A table is a row of cells between upright bars, with a row of hyphens under the first row:

| Chapter | Words |
|---|---|
| The station | 4,210 |
| The night train | 3,880 |

The bars do not have to line up. Retroprose puts in a table from Layout, Table, and Tab moves to the next cell.

Links and footnotes

A link is the words in square brackets with the address straight after them in round brackets. A footnote is a mark such as [^1] in the text, with its note on a line of its own at the end, starting with the same mark and a colon. The guide How to add footnotes in Markdown has the details. In Retroprose, Ctrl+F7 types both halves of a footnote for you, and the exports number the notes in order.

Centred and right-aligned text

Plain Markdown cannot centre a line, so Retroprose puts a short fence above and below the paragraphs:

::: centre
THE END
:::

::: right aligns right and ::: justify justifies. Other Markdown apps show the words as plain paragraphs, with the fences as text, so nothing is lost.

Title and author

A document can start with a short block between two lines of three hyphens, giving its title and author. The exports use them for title pages, letter headings and ebook details:

---
title: The long night
author: Jo Bloggs
---

This is called a YAML block. In Retroprose it is hidden on screen unless you ask for it (View, YAML block), and you never need to type it: File, Properties (Ctrl+F9) fills it in from a form.

When you want a star to be a star

A backslash before a mark makes it plain text, so \* is a star and \# is a hash. One case catches novelists: a line that starts with a year and a full stop, such as "1984. It was a cold spring.", is read as a numbered list starting at 1984. Write 1984\. and it stays a sentence.

Writing Markdown without learning it

You can write in Markdown without remembering a single mark. In Retroprose the keys in the table above type the marks for you, the marks are dimmed so your words stand out, and reveal codes (Alt+F3 or F9) shows them as codes such as [BOLD] and [Head 1] in a pane under the text. When you want a Word file or a PDF, Ctrl+E makes one.

You can try all of this now in the demo, with no account.