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Markdown - How to format text in AuthorDock (Advanced)

Added by Brian Schwartz over 8 years ago

Markdown is the formatting used in AuthorDock and PubWriter.

You can do a lot of fancy formatting in AuthorDock, but it does require that you use Markdown to do it.

Advanced Tutorial

Here is a few of the more popular Markdown formatting programs/apps:

Mac

You can also search the Apple app store - when I last check, there were dozens. One of the more advanced writers is called Ulysses and it has a huge fan base (it's got a bit more of a learning curve).

PC

Also, there's a massive list of Markdown editors (including web based, mac and PC) on Mashable

You are sure to find one that exactly to your liking!

I personally love the NoteBooks app because it allows you to have many notes, folder, and has a nice search function built in. It also runs on the Mac, PC, and iPad!

Author Dock formatting tips

Here's a good tutorial:
http://markdowntutorial.com/

Section breaks
Bulleted Lists

Formatting Cheat Sheet (Markdown)

The source file (before markdown conversion) of this is available at:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16258846/Markdown/markdown.txt

Section breaks (helpful lines to distinguish break sections):

it's 3 asterisks in a row:
***

Paragraph formatting

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

(you can go up to 6 headings if you really need to!)

Character formatting

ITALIC

or

ITALIC

BOLD

**BOLD+ITALIC*

or

BOLD+ITALIC

strikethrough

Bulleted Lists:

  • Item 1
  • Item 2
    • Item 2a
    • Item 2b

Numbered Lists

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

Hyperlinks to external websites (2 methods):

Option 1: You can simple put http:// in front of the URL or www.
Option 2: Or, you can link a word like this: [this link](http://url.com)

Bonus TIP: If you put a standard email address in, AuthorDock will automatically recognize it as an email address.

Quotes (aka comment boxes, callouts):

You can use > or >> or even >>>
depends on how deep you want to go. 99% of the time, just use ' > '

Plain text formatting:

Plain Text Formatting

Hidden text

One of the cooler tricks you can do with markdown, is wrap any text with < > - for example will hide the word 'text' when it gets converted to markdown.

This is helpful for comments to the author you want hidden from the reader.

Paragraph formatting note:

If you want to do a 'soft break' - you need to add two spaces at the end of the line.

Images

In order to insert an image, it has to first exist online and be linkable. Sites like Imgur makes this pretty simple, but you can also use dropbox and flickr.

(IF you do use dropbox (recommended), then put all your images in the PUBLIC folder so you get the correct dl.dropboxusercontent.com link.

There's an icon on the editing toolbar:

Basically, you type the following syntax:
![](image url)

Anchors within a page

Anchors require a little bit of HTML.

First: You have to create a unique anchor (identifier). For example:
<a name="1"></a>

In this case, 1 is the anchor.

Second: You have to point to the anchor, in a similar way you always link, but instead of a URL, you put #:
[text](#1)

Here are a couple screenshots to help you grasp how to do it:

First I created an anchor called 'top':

Second, I created a link to the anchor elsewhere on my page:

Endnotes/Footnotes

(coming soon)

END

Here's some more helpful tutorials on using Markdown:

https://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/concepts/

https://dayone.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200265094-Markdown-Guide

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/29/markdown-primer/

http://brettterpstra.com/why-markdown-a-two-minute-explanation/

https://dayone.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200145825-What-is-Markdown-

Here's a downloadable Markdown handbook:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lk1kx8tfy3hjqtm/markdown-guide.pdf