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How to format your text in Pages with Markdown
How to format your text in Pages with Markdown

Learn how to use Markdown to change your marketplace content pages.

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Written by Sharetribe
Updated over a week ago

Pages lets you create and modify your marketplace’s content pages. The text in these pages can be formatted using Markdown. This guide provides an introduction to Markdown to help you use it when formatting your content pages. To learn more about editing pages in general, read our How to edit Pages article.

What is Markdown

Markdown is a simple markup language used to add formatting to text. If you want to emphasize a part of the content of your Pages, you can do so by formatting the text of your sections and blocks. In practice, Markdown adds basic formatting tags to the underlying code of your page. It doesn’t do anything fancy like changing the font size, font color, or font family — but it covers the essentials, using simple keyboard symbols.

The Pages feature uses a modified version of Markdown syntax. It allows you to add bold, italics, links, lists, headers, code and quotation blocks to the content text. You can only add Markdown to text in Content Blocks. Markdown doesn’t work in section titles, section descriptions or block titles.

This article helps you get an idea of how markdown works. Bear in mind that the rendering in this site is different from the rendering in Pages. The results from using markdown in Pages will not look exactly the same as what you can see here.


Highlighting

You can highlight the text with italics, bold or a combination of both. You can do so by adding asterisks or underlines to the text. See the examples for reference:

This is *italic text* and this is also _italics text_ 
This is **bold text** and this is also __bold text__
This is ***bold and italics text*** and so ___is this text___

This is italic text and this is also italics text
This is bold text and this is also bold text
This is bold and italics text and so is this text


Headers

You can add different levels of headers by adding hashes to the beginning of the text. The number of hash signs determines the heading level:

### h3 Heading 
#### h4 Heading
##### h5 Heading
###### h6 Heading

It is possible to add h1 and h2 headings to the content via markdown. You simply need to follow a similar format. We recommend avoiding doing it, though! A page should only have a single h1 header, which can be added directly through the Page editor to the first title in your page. The h2 can then be added either through the Section or the Block titles.


Links

You can add links to the text by adding square brackets, followed by the link in parenthesis:

Here is [a link to Sharetribe’s site](https://www.sharetribe.com)

Linking to pages within your marketplace site should be done with internal links for faster page loads:

Here is a [link to your About page](/p/about)

You can also turn a URL or an email address into a link by surrounding it with <>:

<https://www.sharetribe.com> or <hello@sharetribe.com>

Link to an email address

You can display a text as a clickable link that opens the user's default email program and creates a new email:

[Contact us](mailto:your-email@example.com)

Lists

You can create ordered or unordered lists.

To create unordered lists, you can use different symbols: plus signs, dashes or asterisks.

- Product  * Product  + Product 
- Service * Service + Service
- Rental * Rental + Rental
  • Product

  • Service

  • Rental

To create ordered lists, you can use numbers. The first number of the list will determine the starting number of the rendered version of the list. The other numbers do not matter.

1. First item     1. First item 
2. Second item 1. Second item
3. Third item 1. Third item
  1. First item

  2. Second item

  3. Third item

43. First item 
1. Second item
2. Third item

43. First item

44. Second item

45. Third item

You can also have indented lists by adding four spaces before the list item

- Product 
- Service
- Rental
- Sauna rental
- Home rental
- Mixed
  • Product

  • Service

  • Rental

    • Sauna rental

    • Home rental

  • Mixed

1. First item
2. Second item
3. Third item
1. First indented item
2. Second indented item
4. Fourth item
  1. First item

  2. Second item

  3. Third item

    1. First indented item

    2. Second indented item

  4. Fourth item


Quotation blocks

You can add quotation blocks to your content by adding the greater than sign (>) before a paragraph:

> This is a quotation paragraph

You can also create nested quotation blocks

> Blockquotes can also be nested... 
>> ...by stacking greater-than signs...
> > > ...or with spaces between arrows.

Lastly, you can use most other formatting symbols inside quotations in order to create more complex quotation blocks.


Code blocks

You can add code blocks to your content. Most marketplaces will not need to add code blocks for coding-related reasons, however, code blocks and code formatting are effective methods for highlighting text.

You can create inline code by using backticks. For example

This is an inline `code`

This is an inline code

You can create blocks of code by using backtick fences which is code surrounded by three backticks (```). For example:

``` 
This is a block of code
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
```

You will, of course, notice that we've been creating blocks of code for the entire article to highlight the markdown code.

This is a block of code 
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3

Horizontal separation line (horizontal rule)

You can divide the text with a horizontal line by adding 3 dashes, 3 asterisks or 3 underscores.

*** 
---
___

It would look something like this


You will notice that in this article itself the sections are separated by similar lines.


Escaping markdown and other limitations

You can “escape” automatic formatting by adding a backspace (\) before the asterisks, hashes, dashes and other symbols used in markdown. This will allow you to display the symbol on the rendered page instead of triggering a specific formatting rule.

There are formatting limitations with Markdown. Line breaks are particularly tricky. No matter how many spaces you add in between paragraphs, the paragraphs will always be separated by the same amount of space.

There are a few additional supported formatting rules with Markdown that would allow you to create the same results as above, but with different symbols. This article doesn’t cover those cases to allow for simpler usage definitions.

Finally, Pages support a lot of the Markdown syntax, but not everything. If you want to learn more about Markdown syntax, you can visit the official Markdown documentation or the Markdown extended syntax guide.


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