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These Markdown Editor let you write and edit markup documents. Use these markdown editor freeware to convert markdown to HTML and PDF. Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax for web writers that is easy to read, easy to write and designed to be eventually converted to rich text while remaining independent from any application. Personal portfolio powered by JekyllPersonal Website. This Markdown cheat sheet provides a quick overview of all the Markdown syntax elements. It can’t cover every edge case, so if you need more information about any of these elements, refer to the reference guides for basic syntax and extended syntax.

• Syntax
  • Citations
  • CriticMarkup
  • File Transclusion
  • Glossaries
  • Math
  • “Standard” Metadata keys
  • Tables

Syntax

Abbreviations (or Acronyms)

NOTE: The syntax for abbreviations changed in MultiMarkdown (MMD) v6.

Abbreviations can be specified using inline or reference syntax. The inline variant requires that the abbreviation be wrapped in parentheses and immediately follows the >.

There is also a “shortcut” method for abbreviations that is similar to the approach used in prior versions of MMD. You specify the definition for the abbreviation in the usual manner, but MMD will automatically identify each instance where the abbreviation is used and substitute it automatically. In this case, the abbreviation is limited to a more basic character set which includes letters, numbers, periods, and hyphens, but not much else. For more complex abbreviations, you must explicitly mark uses of the abbreviation.

There are a few limitations:

• The full name of the abbreviation is plain text only – no MultiMarkdown markup will be processed.

• When exporting to LaTeX, the acronym package is used; this means that the first usage will result in full text (short), and subsequent uses will result in short.

Citations

I have included support for basic bibliography features in MultiMarkdown. I’m open to feedback on ways to improve this but keep the following in mind:

1. Bibliography support in MultiMarkdown is rudimentary. The goal is to offer a basic standalone feature, that can be changed using the tool of your choice to a more robust format (e.g. BibTeX, CiteProc).

2. Those needing more detailed function sets for their bibliographies may need customized tools to provide those services. This is a basic tool that should work for most people. Reference librarians, for example, will probably not be satisfied.

To use citations in MultiMarkdown, you use a syntax much like that for links:

You are not required to use a locator (e.g. “p. 23”), and there are no special rules on what can be used as a locator if you choose to use one. If you prefer to omit the locator, just use an empty set of square brackets before the citation:

There are no rules on the citation key format that you use (e.g. Doe:2006), but it must be preceded by a #, just like footnotes use ^.

As for the reference description, you can use Markup code within this section, and I recommend leaving a blank line afterwards to prevent concatenation of several references. Note that there is no way to reformat these references in different bibliography styles; for this you need a program designed for that purpose (e.g. BibTeX).

If you want to include a source in your bibliography that was not cited, you may use the following:

The Not cited bit is case insensitive.

If you are creating a LaTeX document, the citations will be included, and natbib will be used by default. If you are not using BibTeX and are getting errors about your citations not being compatible with ‘Author-Year’, you can add the following to your documents metadata:

This changes the citation style in natbib to avoid these errors, and is useful when you include your citations in the MultiMarkdown document itself.

NOTE: As of version 6, HTML wraps citation references in parentheses instead of brackets, e.g. (1) instead of [1]. Also, citations are now displayed in a separate section from footnotes when outputting to HTML.

Inline Citations

Citations can also be used in an inline syntax, just like inline footnotes:

BibTeX Citations

If you are creating a LaTeX document, and need a bibliography, then you should definitely look into BibTeX and natbib. It is beyond the scope of this document to describe how these two packages work, but it is possible to combine them with MultiMarkdown.

To use BibTeX in a MultiMarkdown document, you must use the BibTeX metadata to specify where your citations are stored. You may optionally use the biblio style metadata key.

Since natbib is enabled by default, you have a choice between using the citep and citet commands. The following shows how this relates to the MultiMarkdown syntax used.

CriticMarkup

What Is CriticMarkup?

CriticMarkup is a way for authors and editors to track changes to documents in plain text. As with Markdown, small groups of distinctive characters allow you to highlight insertions, deletions, substitutions and comments, all without the overhead of heavy, proprietary office suites. http://criticmarkup.com/

CriticMarkup is integrated with MultiMarkdown itself, as well as MultiMarkdown Composer. I encourage you to check out the CriticMarkup web site to learn more as it can be a very useful tool. There is also a great video showing CriticMarkup in use while editing a document in MultiMarkdown Composer.

Using CriticMarkup With MultiMarkdown

When using CriticMarkup with MultiMarkdown itself, you have three choices:

• Leave the CriticMarkup syntax in place (multimarkdown foo.txt). MultiMarkdown will attempt to show the changes as highlights in the exported document, where possible. This will not always Acer h236hl driver download for windows 10. result in a valid output document.

• Accept all changes, giving you the “new” document (multimarkdown -a foo.txt or multimarkdown --accept foo.txt)

• Reject all changes, giving you the “original” document (multimarkdown -r foo.txt or multimarkdown --reject foo.txt)

• CriticMarkup comments and highlighting are ignored when processing with --accept or --reject.

The CriticMarkup Syntax

The CriticMarkup syntax is fairly straightforward. The key thing to remember is that CriticMarkup is processed before any other MultiMarkdown is handled. It’s almost like a separate layer on top of the MultiMarkdown syntax.

When editing in MultiMarkdown Composer, you can have CriticMarkup syntax flagged in the both the editor pane and the preview window. This will allow you to see changes in the HTML preview.

• Deletions from the original text:

  This is is a test.

• Additions:

  This a test.

• Substitutions:

  This isn’t a test.

• Highlighting:

  This is a test.

• Comments:

  This is a testWhat is it a test of?.

CriticMarkup Limitations

If you --accept or --reject CriticMarkup changes, then it should work properly in any document.

If you want to try to include your changes as “notes” in the final document, then certain situations will lead to results that were probably not what you intended.

1. CriticMarkup must be contained within a single block (e.g. paragraph, list item, etc.) CM that spans multiple blocks will not be recognized.

2. CriticMarkup that crosses multiple MMD spans (e.g. {++** foo} bar**) will not properly manage the intended MultiMarkdown markup. This example would not result in bold being applied to foo bar.

My philosophy on CriticMarkup

I view CriticMarkup as two things (in addition to the actual tools that implement these concepts):

1. A syntax for documenting editing notes and changes, and for collaborating amongst coauthors.

2. A means to display those notes/changes in the HTML output.

I believe that #1 is a really great idea, and well implemented. #2 is not so well implemented, largely due to the “orthogonal” nature of CriticMarkup and the underlying Markdown syntax.

CM is designed as a separate layer on top of Markdown/MultiMarkdown. This means that a Markdown span could, for example, start in the middle of a CriticMarkup structure, but end outside of it. This means that an algorithm to properly convert a CM/Markdown document to HTML would be quite complex, with a huge number of edge cases to consider. I’ve tried a few (fairly creative, in my opinion) approaches, but they didn’t work. Perhaps someone else will come up with a better solution, or will be so interested that they put the work in to create the complex algorithm. I have no current plans to do so.

Additionally, there is a philosophical distinction between documenting editing notes, and using those notes to produce a “finished” document (e.g. HTML or PDF) that keeps those editing notes intact (e.g. strikethroughs, highlighting, etc.) I believe that CM is incredibly useful for the editing process, but am less convinced for the output process (I know many others disagree with me, and that’s ok. And to be clear, I think that what Gabe and Erik have done with CriticMarkup is fantastic!)

There are other CriticMarkup tools besides MultiMarkdown and MultiMarkdown Composer, and you are more than welcome to use them.

For now, the official MultiMarkdown support for CriticMarkup consists of:

1. CriticMarkup syntax is “understood” by the MultiMarkdown parser, and by MultiMarkdown Composer syntax highlighting.

2. When converting from MultiMarkdown text to an output format, you can ignore CM formatting with compatibility mode (probably not what you want to do), accept all changes, or reject all changes (as above). These are the preferred choices.

3. The secondary choice, is to attempt to show the changes in the exported document. Because the syntaxes are orthogonal, this will not always work properly, and will not always give valid output files.

Cross-References

An oft-requested feature was the ability to have Markdown automatically handlewithin-document links as easily as it handled external links. To this aim, Iadded the ability to interpret [Some Text][] as a cross-link, if a headernamed “Some Text” exists.

As an example, [Metadata][] will take you to thesection describing metadata.

Alternatively, you can include an optional label of your choosing to helpdisambiguate cases where multiple headers have the same title:

This allows you to use [MultiMarkdownOverview] to refer to this sectionspecifically, and not another section named Overview. This works with atx-or settext-style headers.

If you have already defined an anchor using the same id that is used by aheader, then the defined anchor takes precedence.

Multimarkdown Table Syntax

In addition to headers within the document, you can provide labels for imagesand tables which can then be used for cross-references as well.

Definition Lists

MultiMarkdown has support for definition lists using the same syntax used inPHP Markdown Extra. Specifically:

becomes:

Apple

Pomaceous fruit of plants of the genus Malus inthe family Rosaceae.

An american computer company.

Orange

The fruit of an evergreen tree of the genus Citrus.

You can have more than one term per definition by placing each term on aseparate line. Each definition starts with a colon, and you can have more thanone definition per term. You may optionally have a blank line between the lastterm and the first definition.

Definitions may contain other block level elements, such as lists,blockquotes, or other definition lists.

Unlike PHP Markdown Extra, all definitions are wrapped in <p> tags. First, Iwas unable to get Markdown not to create paragraphs. Second, I didn’t seewhere it mattered - the only difference seems to be aesthetic, and I actuallyprefer the <p> tags in place. Let me know if this is a problem.

See the PHP Markdown Extra page for more information.

Escaped newlines

Thanks to a contribution from Nicolas, MultiMarkdown has an additional syntax to indicate a line break. The usual approach for Markdown is “space-space-newline” — two spaces at the end of the line. For some users, this causes problems:

• the trailing spaces are typically invisible when glancing at the source, making it easy to overlook them

• some users' text editors modify trailing space (IMHO, the proper fix for this is a new text editor…)

Nicolas submitted a patch that enables a new option that interprets “” before a newline as a marker that a line break should be used:

Fenced Code Blocks

In addition to the regular indented code block that Markdown uses, you can use “fenced” code blocks in MultiMarkdown. These code blocks do not have to be indented, and can also be configured to be compatible with a third party syntax highlighter. These code blocks should begin with 3 to 5 backticks, an optional language specifier (if using a syntax highlighter), and should end with the same number of backticks you started with:

I don’t recommend any specific syntax highlighter, but have used the following metadata to set things up. It may or may not work for you:

Fenced code blocks are particularly useful when including another file (File Transclusion), and you want to show the source of the file, not what the file looks like when processed by MultiMarkdown.

NOTE: In MultiMarkdown v6, if there is no closing fence, then the code block continues until the end of the document.

File Transclusion

File transclusion is the ability to tell MultiMarkdown to insert the contents of another file inside the current file being processed. For example:

If a file named some_other_file.txt exists, its contents will be inserted inside of this document before being processed by MultiMarkdown. This means that the contents of the file can also contain MultiMarkdown formatted text.

If you want to display the contents of the file without processing it, you can include it in a code block (you may need to remove trailing newlines at the end of the document to be included):

Transclusion is recursive, so the file being inserted will be scanned to see if it references any other files.

Metadata in the file being inserted will be ignored. This means that the file can contain certain metadata when viewed alone that will not be included when the file is transcluded by another file.

You can use the [Transclude Base] metadata to specify where MultiMarkdown should look for the files to be included. All files must be in this folder. If this folder is not specified, then MultiMarkdown will look in the same folder as the parent file.

Note: Thanks to David Richards for his ideas in developing support for this feature.

Search Paths

When you process a file with MMD, it uses that file’s directory as the searchpath for included files. For example:

This is the same as MMD v 5. What’s different is that when you transclude afile, the search path stays the same as the “parent” file, UNLESS you usethe transclude base metadata to override it. The simplest override is:

This means that any transclusions within the file will be calculated relativeto the file, regardless of the original search path.

Alternatively you could specify that any transclusion happens inside asubfolder:

Or you can specify an absolute path:

This flexibility means that you can transclude different files based onwhether a file is being processed by itself or as part of a “parent” file.This can be useful when a particular file can either be a standalone document,or a chapter inside a larger document.

Wildcard Extensions

Sometimes you may wish to transclude alternate versions of a file depending on your output format. Simply use the extension “.*” to have MMD choose the proper version of the file (e.g. foo.tex, foo.fodt, foo.html, etc.)

Transclusion Preprocessing

If you want to perform transclusion, without converting to another format, you can use mmd as the output format:

This will only perform “basic” transclusion –it does not support wildcard extensions, since the final output format is not known.

Footnotes

I have added support for footnotes to MultiMarkdown, using the syntax proposed by John Gruber. Unfortunately, he never implemented footnotes in Markdown.

To create a footnote, enter something like the following:

The footnote itself must be at the start of a line, just like links by reference. If you want a footnote to have multiple paragraphs, lists, etc., then the subsequent paragraphs need an extra tab preceding them. You may have to experiment to get this just right, and please let me know of any issues you find.

This is what the final result looks like:

Here is some text containing a footnote.¹

You can also use “inline footnotes”:

Glossaries

MultiMarkdown has a feature that allows footnotes to be specified as glossary terms. It doesn’t do much for XHTML documents, but the XSLT file that converts the document into LaTeX is designed to convert these special footnotes into glossary entries.

NOTE: The syntax for glossary terms changed in MMD v6.

If there are terms in your document you wish to define in a glossary at the end of your document, you can define them using the glossary syntax.

Glossary terms can be specified using inline or reference syntax. The inline variant requires that the abbreviation be wrapped in parentheses and immediately follows the ?.

Much like abbreviations, there is also a “shortcut” method that is similar to the approach used in prior versions of MMD. You specify the definition for the glossary term in the usual manner, but MMD will automatically identify each instance where the term is used and substitute it automatically. In this case, the term is limited to a more basic character set which includes letters, numbers, periods, and hyphens, but not much else. For more complex glossary terms, you must explicitly mark uses of the term.

LaTeX Glossaries

Note: Getting glossaries to work is a slightly more advanced LaTeXfeature, and might take some trial and error the first few times.

Unfortunately, it takes an extra step to generate the glossary when creating apdf from a latex file:

1. You need to have the basic.gst file installed, which comes with thememoir class.

2. You need to run a special makeindex command to generate the .glo file:makeindex -s `kpsewhich basic.gst` -o 'filename.gls' 'filename.glo'

3. Then you run the usual pdflatex command again a few times.

Alternatively, you can use the code below to create an engine file for TeXShop (it belongs in ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines). You can name it something like MemoirGlossary.engine. Then, when processing a file that needs a glossary, you typeset your document once with this engine, and then continue to process it normally with the usual LaTeX engine. Your glossary should be compiled appropriately. If you use TeXShop, this is the way to go.

Images

The basic syntax for images in Markdown is:

In addition to the attributes you can use with links and images (described in another section), MultiMarkdown also adds a few additional features. If an image is the only thing in a paragraph, it is treated as a block level element:

The resulting HTML is:

The first one would be an inline image. The second one (in HTML) would be wrapped in an HTML figure element. In this case, the alt text is also used as a figure caption, and can contain MultiMarkdown syntax (e.g. bold, emph, etc.). The alt text is not specifically designed to limit which MultiMarkdown is supported, but there will be limits and block level elements aren’t supported.

Link and Image Attributes

Adding attributes to links and images has been requested for a long time onthe Markdown discussion list. I was fairly opposed to this, as most of theproposals really disrupted the readability of the syntax. I consider myself a“Markdown purist”, meaning that I took John’s introduction to heart:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to makeit as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatteddocument should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without lookinglike it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. WhileMarkdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTMLfilters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’ssyntax is the format of plain text email.

Because there was not a syntax proposal that I felt fit this goal, I was generally opposed to the idea.

Then, Choan C. Gálvez proposed a brilliantly simple syntax thatstayed out of the way. By simply appending the attributes to the linkreference information, which is already removed from the text itself, itdoesn’t disturb the readability.

For example:

This will generate width and height attributes for the image, and a borderaround the link. And while it can be argued that it does look “like it’s beenmarked up with tags [and] formatting instructions”, even I can’t argue toostrongly against it. The link and the title in quotes already look like someform of markup, and the the additional tags are hardly that intrusive, andthey offer a great deal of functionality. They might even be useful in furtherfunctions (citations?).

The attributes must continue after the other link/image data, and may containnewlines, but must start at the beginning of the line. The format isattribute=value or attribute='multi word value'. Currently, MultiMarkdowndoes not attempt to interpret or make any use of any of these attributes.Also, you can’t have a multiword attribute span a newline.

NOTE: As of version 6, MultiMarkdown will also allow attributes in inline links as well:

Math

MultiMarkdown 2.0 used ASCIIMathML to typeset mathematical equations. Therewere benefits to using ASCIIMathML, but also some disadvantages.

When rewriting for MultiMarkdown 3.0, there was no straightforward way toimplement ASCIIMathML which lead me to look for alternatives. I settled onusing MathJax. The advantage here is that the same syntax is supported byMathJax in browsers, and in native LaTeX syntax when creating LaTeX documents.

To enable MathJax support in web pages, you have to include a link to anactive MathJax installation — setting this up is beyond the scope of thisdocument, but it’s not too hard.

Here’s an example of the metadata setup, and some math:

Here’s what it looks like in action (if you’re viewing this document in asupported format):

An example of math within a paragraph — ({e}^{ipi }+1=0)— easy enough.

And an equation on it’s own:

[ {x}_{1,2}=frac{-bpm sqrt{{b}^{2}-4ac}}{2a} ]

That’s it.

In addition to the [ ] and ( ) syntax, you can use LaTeX-style “dollar sign” delimiters:

In order to be correctly parsed as math, there must not be any space between the $ and the actual math on the inside of the delimiter, and there must be space on the outside. ASCII punctuation can also serve as “space” outside of the math.

Superscripts and Subscripts

You can easily include superscripts and subscripts in MultiMarkdown as well:

becomes

This apartment has an area of 100m²
One must consider the value of x_z

The subscript must not contain any whitespace or punctuation.

More complicated exponents and subscripts can be delimited like this:

y^(a+b)
x_y,z

Metadata

It is possible to include special metadata at the top of a MultiMarkdowndocument, such as title, author, etc. This information can then be used tocontrol how MultiMarkdown processes the document, or can be used in certainoutput formats in special ways. For example:

The syntax for including metadata is simple.

• The metadata must begin at the very top of the document - no blank lines can precede it. There can optionally be a --- on the line before and after the metadata. The line after the metadata can also be ... This is to provide better compatibility with YAML, though MultiMarkdown doesn’t support all YAML metadata.

• Metadata consists of two parts - the key and the value

• The metadata key must begin at the beginning of the line. It must start with an ASCII letter or a number, then the following characters can consist of ASCII letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens, or underscore characters.

• The end of the metadata key is specified with a colon (‘:’)

• After the colon comes the metadata value, which can consist of pretty much any characters (including new lines). To keep multiline metadata values from being confused with additional metadata, I recommend indenting each new line of metadata. If your metadata value includes a colon, it must be indented to keep it from being treated as a new key-value pair.

• While not required, I recommend using two spaces at the end of each line of metadata. This will improve the appearance of the metadata section if your document is processed by Markdown instead of MultiMarkdown.

• Metadata keys are case insensitive and stripped of all spaces during processing. This means that Base Header Level, base headerlevel, and baseheaderlevel are all the same.

• Metadata is processed as plain text, so it should not include MultiMarkdown markup.

• After the metadata is finished, a blank line triggers the beginning of the rest of the document.

Metadata “Variables”

You can substitute the value for a metadata key in the body of a document using the following format, where foo and bar are the keys of the desired metadata.

“Standard” Metadata keys

There are a few metadata keys that are standardized in MultiMarkdown. You canuse any other keys that you desire, but you have to make use of them yourself.

My goal is to keep the list of “standard” metadata keys as short as possible.

Author

This value represents the author of the document and is used in LaTeX, ODF, and RTFdocuments to generate the title information.

Affiliation

This is used to enter further information about the author — a link to awebsite, the name of an employer, academic affiliation, etc.

Base Header Level

This is used to change the top level of organization of the document. For example:

Normally, the Introduction would be output as <h1> in HTML, or part{} in LaTeX. If you’re writing a shorter document, you may wish for the largest division in the document to be <h2> or chapter{}. The Base Header Level metadata tells MultiMarkdown to change the largest division level to the specified value.

This can also be useful when using transclusion to combine multiple documents.

Base Header Level does not trigger a complete document.

Additionally, there are “flavors” of this metadata key for various output formats so that you can specify a different header level for different output formats — e.g. LaTeX Header Level, HTML Header Level, and ODF Header Level.

If you are doing something interesting with File Transclusion, you can also use a negative number here. Since metadata is not used when a file is “transcluded”, this allows you to use a different level of headings when a file is processed on its own.

Biblio Style

This metadata specifies the name of the BibTeX style to be used, if you arenot using natbib.

BibTeX

This metadata specifies the name of the BibTeX file used to store citationinformation. Do not include the trailing ‘.bib’.

Copyright

This can be used to provide a copyright string.

CSS

This metadata specifies a URL to be used as a CSS file for the produceddocument. Obviously, this is only useful when outputting to HTML.

Date

Specify a date to be associated with the document.

HTML Header

You can include raw HTML information to be included in the <head> section of the document. MultiMarkdown doesn’t perform any validation or processing of this data — it just copies it as is.

As an example, this can be useful to link your document to a working MathJaxinstallation (not provided by me):

HTML Footer

Raw HTML can be included here, and will be appended at the very end of the document, after footnotes, etc. Useful for linking to scripts that must be included after footnotes.

Language

The language metadata key specified the content language for a document using the standardized two letter code (e.g. en for English). Where possible, this will also set the quotes language metadata key to the appropriate value.

LaTeX Author

Since MultiMarkdown syntax is not processed inside of metadata, you can use the latex author metadata to override the regular author metadata when exporting to LaTeX.

This metadata must come after the regular author metadata if it is also being used.

Multimarkdown Syntax

LaTeX Begin

This is the name of a LaTeX file to be included (via input{foo}) when exporting to LaTeX. This file will be included after the metadata, and before the body of the document. This is usually where the begin{document} command occurs, hence the name.

LaTeX Config

This is a shortcut key when exporting to LaTeX that automatically populates the latex leader, latex begin, and latex footer metadata based on a standardized naming convention.

latex config: article would be the same as the following setup:

The standard LaTeX support files have been updated to support this naming configuration:

LaTeX Footer

The name of a file to be included at the end of a LaTeX document.

LaTeX Header

Raw LaTeX source to be added to the metadata section of the document. Note: This is distinct from the latex leader, latex begin, and latex footer metadata which can only contain a filename.

LaTeX Leader

The name of a file to be included at the very beginning of a LaTeX document, before the metadata.

LaTeX Mode

When outputting a document to LaTeX, there are two special options that changethe output slightly — memoir and beamer. These options are designed tobe compatible with the LaTeX classes of the same names.

LaTeX Title

Since MultiMarkdown syntax is not processed inside of metadata, you can use the latex title metadata to override the regular title metadata when exporting to LaTeX.

This metadata must come after the regular title metadata if it is also being used.

MMD Header

MMD Header provides text that will be inserted before the main body of text, prior to parsing the document. If you want to include an external file, use the transclusion syntax ({{foo.txt}}).

MMD Footer

The MMD Footer metadata is like MMD Header, but it appends text at the end of the document, prior to parsing. Use transclusion if you want to reference an external file.

This is useful for keeping a list of references, abbreviations, footnotes, links, etc. all in a single file that can be reused across multiple documents. If you’re building a big document out of smaller documents, this allows you to use one list in all files, without multiple copies being inserted in the master file.

ODF Header

You can include raw XML to be included in the header of a file output inOpenDocument format. It’s up to you to properly format your XML and get itworking — MultiMarkdown just copies it verbatim to the output.

Quotes Language

This is used to specify which style of “smart” quotes to use in the output document. The available options are:

Multimarkdown Syntax Cheat Sheet

• dutch (or nl)
• english (en)
• french (fr)
• german (de)
• germanguillemets
• spanish (es)
• swedish (sv)

The default is english if not specified. This affects HTML output. Tochange the language of a document in LaTeX is up to the individual.

Quotes Language does not trigger a complete document.

Title

Self-explanatory.

Transclude Base

When using the File Transclusion feature to “link” to other documents inside a MultiMarkdown document, this metadata specifies a folder that contains the files being linked to. If omitted, the default is the folder containing the file in question. This can be a relative path or a complete path.

This metadata can be particularly useful when using MultiMarkdown to parse a text string that does not exist as a file on the computer, and therefore does not have a parent folder (when using stdin or another application that offers MultiMarkdown support). In this case, the path must be a complete path.

Raw Source

In older versions of MultiMarkdown you could use an HTML comment to pass raw LaTeX or other content to the final document. This worked reasonably well, but was limited and didn’t work well when exporting to multiple formats. It was time for something new.

MMD v6 offers a new feature to handle this. Code spans and code blocks can be flagged as representing raw source:

The contents of the span/block will be passed through unchanged.

You can specify which output format is compatible with the specified source:

• html
• odt
• epub
• latex
• * – wildcard matches any output format

Smart Typography

MultiMarkdown incorporates John Gruber’s SmartyPants tool in addition to the core Markdown functionality. This program converts “plain” punctuation into “smarter” typographic punctuation.

Just like the original, MultiMarkdown converts:

• Straight quotes (' and ') into “curly” quotes
• Backticks-style quotes (``this') into “curly” quotes
• Dashes (-- and ---) into en- and em- dashes
• Three dots (..) become an ellipsis

MultiMarkdown also includes support for quotes styles other than English (the default). Use the quotes language metadata to choose:

• dutch (nl)
• german(de)
• germanguillemets
• french(fr)
• spanish(en)
• swedish(sv)

This feature is enabled by default, but is disabled in compatibility mode, since it is not part of the original Markdown. You can also use the --nosmart command line option to disable this feature.

Table of Contents

As of version 4.7, MultiMarkdown supports the use of {{TOC}} to insert a Table of Contents in the document. This is automatically generated from the headers included in the document.

When possible, MultiMarkdown uses the “native” TOC for a given output format. For example, tableofcontents when exporting to LaTeX.

As of version 6.5, MultiMarkdown also supports two additional versions:

• {{TOC:2}} – this limits the TOC to “level 2” entries
• {{TOC:2-3}} – this limts the TOC to levels 2 and 3

Multimarkdown Syntax

Tables

Table Basics

MultiMarkdown has a special syntax for creating tables. It is generally compatible with the syntax used by Michael Fortin for PHP Markdown Extra

Basically, it allows you to turn:

into the following table.

Table Rules

The requirements are:

• There must be at least one | per line

• The “separator” line between headers and table content must contain only |,-, =, :,., +, or spaces

• Cell content must be on one line only

• Columns are separated by |

• The first line of the table, and the alignment/divider line, must start atthe beginning of the line

Other notes:

• It is optional whether you have | characters at the beginning and end of lines.

• The “separator” line uses ---- or to indicate the line between a header and cell. The length of the line doesn’t matter, but must have at least one character per cell.

• To set alignment, you can use a colon to designate left or right alignment, or a colon at each end to designate center alignment, as above. If no colon is present, the default alignment of your system is selected (left in most cases). If the separator line ends with +, then cells in that column will be wrapped when exporting to LaTeX if they are long enough.

• To indicate that a cell should span multiple columns, then simply add additional pipes (|) at the end of the cell, as shown in the example. If the cell in question is at the end of the row, then of course that means that pipes are not optional at the end of that row…. The number of pipes equals the number of columns the cell should span.

• You can use normal Markdown markup within the table cells.

• Captions are optional, but if present must be at the beginning of the line immediately following the table, start with [, and end with ]. If you have a caption before and after the table, only the first match will be used.

• If you have a caption, you can also have a label, allowing you to create anchors pointing to the table. If there is no label, then the caption acts as the label

• Cells can be empty.

• You can create multiple <tbody> tags (for HTML) within a table by having a single empty line between rows of the table. This allows your CSS to place horizontal borders to emphasize different sections of the table. This feature doesn’t work in all output formats (e.g. RTF and OpenDocument).

Limitations of Tables

• MultiMarkdown table support is designed to handle most tables for most people; it doesn’t cover all tables for all people. If you need complex tables you will need to create them by hand or with a tool specifically designed for your output format. At some point, however, you should consider whether a table is really the best approach if you find MultiMarkdown tables too limiting.

• Native RTF support for tables is very limited. If you need more complex tables, I recommend using the OpenDocument format, and then using LibreOffice to convert your document to RTF.

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