Hey all!

This is a series of articles I'm going to be posting up about how the various features around the site work. Maybe why I choose why I did, and how you can make the most of it. The first one I'm going to cover is called markdown.

Markdown is a markup (get it?) language with syntax inspired heavily by how people were writing e-mails for ages. For instance, to make italic words, you simply wrap something in asterisks: *waves a hand* becomes waves a hand.

Why markdown?

Certainly there are other alternatives, particularly among roleplay sites. Most of such sites are written in PHP and use some kind of phpBB, a kind of forum system that became popular really quickly because of its ease to set up and low cost to host. This uses its own kind of forum markup called bbcode which is based off of HTML, only replacing the angle brackets with square ones. So instead of writing <b>hello world!</b> you'd write [b]hello world![/b]. This makes it easy to parse and translate into the HTML to be rendered, but it's un-natural to write by hand, and without a proper syntax editor that can close the tags for you, prone to error. It also does not look anything like the text to be rendered out, meaning in order to view your text meaningfully, you need to stick into a parser. Overall, I found this solution full of more problems than solutions it offered. I decided against it.

Enter markdown! Markdown seems to be designed specifically to address the gripes people had with bbcode-like markup systems. Instead of remembering HTML tags and manually hunting down improperly closed tags etc. you just write like you would an e-mail, and let the parser handle making it look like pretty HTML. In short, I think it'll be something that won't get in your way while you're roleplaying, as the language is very light-weight.

Italics

*waves a hand*

waves a hand

Bold

*slams into the ground **forcefully** with his foot*

slams into the ground forcefully with his foot

Lists

* thing a
* thing b
* thing c
* thing d

• thing a
• thing b
• thing c
• thing d

You can also order this by replacing the first star with 1., the second with 2., and so on.

Links

[This](https://www.google.com) is a link to the site l looked at.

This is a link to the site l looked at.

[This][google] is a link to the site I looked at. [google]: https://www.google.com

This is a link to the site I looked at.

Note that with the inline link, you use parens () to indicate the url. With the reference-style links, you use square brackets [].

Headers

# large!
## medium!
### smaller!
#### even smaller!

large!

medium!

smaller!

even smaller!

Horizontal rules

thing 1
* * *
thing 2

thing 1

thing 2

Quotes

> Smarter men than me have said dumber things.
*-some dead guy*

Smarter men than me have said dumber things. -some dead guy

Manual line breaks

Roses are white    
Violets are blue  
I'm not poet  
But I hate you  

Roses are white
Violets are blue
I'm not poet
But I hate you

End something with two or more spaces to indicate you want to end the line there. Otherwise, only empty new lines count.

WA