What is Markdown?

Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *. You can use Markdown most places around GitHub using files with the .md or .markdown extension.

Syntax guide

Here’s an overview of Markdown syntax that you can use anywhere on GitHub.com or in your own text files.

Headers

# This is an <h1> tag
## This is an <h2> tag
###### This is an <h6> tag

Emphasis

*This text will be italic*
_This will also be italic_

**This text will be bold**
__This will also be bold__

_You **can** combine them_

Lists

Unordered

* Item 1
* Item 2
  * Item 2a
  * Item 2b

Ordered

1. Item 1
1. Item 2
1. Item 3
   1. Item 3a
   1. Item 3b

Images

![GitHub Logo](/images/logo.png)
Format: ![Alt Text](url)

http://github.com - automatic!
[GitHub](http://github.com)

Blockquotes

As Kanye West said:

> We're living the future so
> the present is our past.

Inline code

I think you should use an
`<addr>` element here instead.

Syntax highlighting

Here’s an example of how you can use syntax highlighting with GitHub Flavored Markdown:

```javascript
function fancyAlert(arg) {
  if(arg) {
    $.facebox({div:'#foo'})
  }
}
\```

You can also simply indent your code by four spaces:

    function fancyAlert(arg) {
      if(arg) {
        $.facebox({div:'#foo'})
      }
    }

Here’s an example of Python code without syntax highlighting:

def foo():
    if not bar:
        return True

Task Lists

- [x] @mentions, #refs, [links](), **formatting**, and <del>tags</del> supported
- [x] list syntax required (any unordered or ordered list supported)
- [x] this is a complete item
- [ ] this is an incomplete item

If you include a task list in the first comment of an Issue, you will get a handy progress indicator in your issue list. It also works in Pull Requests!

Tables

You can create tables by assembling a list of words and dividing them with hyphens - (for the first row), and then separating each column with a pipe : 
| First Header | Second Header |
|--------------|---------------|
| Content from cell 1 |	Content from cell 2 |
| Content in the first column |	Content in the second column |

Would become:

First Header Second Header
Content from cell 1 Content from cell 2
Content in the first column Content in the second column

Strikethrough

Any word wrapped with two tildes (like ~~this~~) will appear crossed out (like this).