I learned markdown from a cheat sheet.

And I still reference cheat sheets when I can't remember how to format something.

But cheat sheet is just a document with notes that you can reference when needed.

It's impossible to remember everything about any coding language.

So this type of reference document, or cheat sheet, is helpful.

I thought it might be nice to create a cheat sheet together.

If you follow along with these videos, you will by the end of the course,

have a mark down cheat sheet for your own reference.

That's right, we're going to use markdown to make a markdown reference.

Enough of my mug, let's see my screen and go from there.

In this video, I'll cover creating headlines, paragraphs,

quotes, bolding and italicizing text, and creating horizontal rules.

In the previous video, I created the headline.

To format a headline, or heading, in markdown, you use a pound symbol or

#, and then the text that you wanna use for your heading.

That's why markdown basics is large and bold over here in our preview.

It's formatted as a first level heading.

The most common way to render markdown is with HTML.

Basically our final document will be translated into HTML for use on the web.

HTML provides six levels of headings.

For this reason, we have six levels of headings in markdown too.

Again, you don't need to know any HTML.

I bring it up here only to provide some background.

You type that single hash to create the largest, or first level, heading.

A second level heading uses two hashes next to each other followed by

a space in your text.

The rest of the headlines just use another hash.

The first section of our cheat sheet will be about headlines,

paragraphs and basic formatting, so let's add that as a second level heading.

So type one, two hashes, space and

then our text which is Headlines,

Paragraphs, and Basic Formatting.

Now beneath this larger topic, we've been talking about headlines and

since we're creating a cheat sheet together, let's create that as a third

level heading, so one, two, three, and we'll call this headlines.

Now, to save us a little bit of time,

I'm going to just copy some headlines that I already have and paste them in here.

And you can see our fourth, fifth and sixth level headings, here in our preview.

We'll create some more heading as we go.

But I think this is enough demonstration for now.

Let's delete this starter text and write our paragraphs and line break section.

So I'll add that as another third level heading.

We'll call this Paragraphs and Line Breaks.

We create paragraphs by typing the way we would in any other program.

Just hit Return twice to start another paragraph.

There is really nothing special about the paragraph.

Where you see empty space between blocks of text and

your mark down document you will see empty space separating those

blocks of text in your formatted HTML document.

I'm going to save us a little time again and just paste in two paragraphs here.

As you can see we have space here which corresponds to our space over here.

Now to make this a little easier to see I'm just gonna add a bunch of returns

in here that's not important for

the document but it just makes it a little easier to see in the video.

Now you don't always want that space that appears between one line of text and

another when you're creating line breaks.

For example, lines of poetry or

song lyrics don't typically have spaces between them the way paragraphs do.

To add just a Line Break without a space type two spaces at the end of the line and

then press Return once.

Let's practice this by adding a stanza from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet number 17.

So I'll just type the first line here.

And then this is the end of our first line so I'll type one, two spaces.

Return and my second line.

And this is the end of my second line, so one, two, return.

And our third line,

And again, one, two.

And now to save us a little bit of time I'm just going to copy the last

two lines of the stanza as well as our attribution and paste them into our doc.

Okay, and if we scroll down in our preview,

we can see that this is working mostly the way we expect.

However, here between, any and other, we should have a line break.

So, we can just come up and fix that one two.

And you can see it fixed here in the preview.

And then don't worry about this too much, this is just the attribution for

the book that I pulled this stanza out of.

You can definitely check it out if you want, Pablo Neruda stuff is great.

So let me come over here and we will add another heading for our next section,

which is Emphasis and Bolding.

The ability to italicize and bold text is a must for any formatting tool.

Markdown makes it easy.

Let's start with emphasis which will show up as italicized text.

Now, I'm gonna throw in a fourth level heading here for italics,

it might seem like overkill but I like to keep things as organized as possible.

So one two three four italics, and

then I'll throw in again just a bunch more returns, and that's just to make it.

Easy for us to see.

Now, emphasis can be added by placing either the asterisk or

the underscore characters on both sides of the text that you wanna format.

So, this works and

this Works too.

If we scroll down in our preview you can see works as italicized in both places.

I recommend using the * like this because it's preferred by the type of mark down

used on GitHub which is a popular service used by programmers,

we mentioned it earlier.

Also, in coding languages such as Python, the underscore character is used often,

so it's nice to have the underscore stand out as part of your text

rather than allowing it to be mistaken for Markdown syntax.

Bolding is just like italicizing text but you add another asterisk or

underscore on both sides of the text.

So, this works and

this Works too.

And again you can see down in the preview our text is bold in both places.

Again, I prefer the asterisk to the underscore.

The important thing is to be consistent pick one of the options and

stick to it throughout the markdown file.

You can even bold and italicize text at the same time, like this.

So we have two for the bolding, one for the italics, and

again both sides of the text.

And this would work too, again one for

italics, two for bolding, and

you can see here on our preview works is italicized abled in both places.

All right, we've covered some core topics but

there are two more things to see in this video.

The Blockquote and the Horizontal Rule.

A blockquote sets text apart from the rest of the document.

As the name implies, it's often use for quotes,

more specifically it indicates that the text is quoted from another source.

So let's thrown in a third level heading for Blockquotes.

And then to save us a little time, I have a quote all ready to paste in here,

from the creator of Markdown, John Gruber, paste that there.

Now you might've noticed something.

The Blockquote is formatted using the greater than symbol.

If you want the blockquote to span multiple paragraphs

the greater than symbol needs to appear on the empty space between paragraph as well.

Now let's scroll down in our preview.

And you can see the way Adam is displaying this we have this bar,

beside the Blockquote, the background is a slightly different color.

And we have our text all indented and separated out from the rest of the text.

So you can see there's just a little bit formatting for

a Blockquote to separate it out.

Okay, that's a good start.

Let's separate this from our next section with our horizontal rule.

Which is just a line used to separate sections of a document.

First I will create a few returns in here so we can see what we're doing,

and one, two, three, Horizontal Rule.

Now you create the Horizontal Rule with either underscores, hyphens,

or the asterisk.

I prefer hyphens because that leaves the asterisk for

bolding, italicizing, and making lists, which we'll see in the next video.

Also hyphens look like lines,

so they're easy to remember when making a Horizontal Rule.

I'll type all three examples here just so that you can see them in action.

So we've got the ___, the ---,

and the ***,

and you can see it's just three of those in all three cases.

If we scroll down you can see three Horizontal Rules.

All right, that's a wrap on this section.

Save this, and I will see you in the next video.