Introduction to Markdown

Written by Grant - Postpone Founder

Updated 11 months ago

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plain text. This tutorial will introduce you to the basic syntax of Markdown and how to use it in Reddit posts.

For a deeper dive on which Markdown features Reddit supports, check out Reddit's official Markdown documentation.

Why Markdown?

With Markdown, you can easily create complex text formatting with simple symbols and characters. This makes it ideal for online writing where simplicity and speed are key. It's used widely on sites like Reddit, GitHub, and Stack Overflow, amongst others.

Postpone and Markdown

Postpone supports Markdown in the same places that Reddit does:

Reddit post text
Reddit comments
Reddit direct messages and comment replies

Markdown symbols

The following are the most common symbols used to write Markdown:

Headers

You can create headers of different sizes using hashtags (#). For example:

# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
#### Heading 4
##### Heading 5
###### Heading 6

In Reddit, however, only # Heading 1 and ## Heading 2 are effectively displayed.

Text Styles

To italicize text, you can wrap your text with one asterisk or underscore on each side. To make text bold, you can wrap it with two asterisks or underscores. Example:

*italic* or _italic_ will render as italic.
**bold** or __bold__ will render as bold.

Links and Images

To create a link, you put the link text in brackets and the URL in parentheses, like this:

[Google](https://www.google.com) will render as Google.

Images are similar, but they include an exclamation point at the beginning:

![Alt text](URL) will display the image located at "URL".

Unfortunately, Reddit doesn't support inline images in the markdown, so use the Reddit's own image upload tool to add images to your posts.

Lists

You can create unordered lists with asterisks, pluses, or hyphens. Like this:

* Item 1
+ Item 2
- Item 3

Each will render as:

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3

Ordered lists can be created using numbers followed by a period. Like this:

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

Blockquotes

To create a blockquote, you can prefix a line with the ">" character. For example:

> This is a blockquote

Will render as:

This is a blockquote

Horizontal Rule

Use three hyphens, asterisks, or underscores to create a horizontal rule:

Code

You can format text as code in two ways. Inline code can be wrapped with backticks. Like this:

`code` will render as code.

To create a code block, wrap your code with three backticks:

```
code block
```

The above will render as:

cssCopy codecode block

Remember that Reddit's support for Markdown is not full, so some advanced features may not work as expected. However, this tutorial should give you a good start on the basics of Reddit post formatting.

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