Markdown from scratch · Chapter 2

Emphasis

With asterisks, tildes and backticks around a word you change how it looks. The characters have to sit right against the word, without a space in between.

Making words bold, italic or struck through

The dough must rest for **at least twelve hours**.
The flour is *whole wheat*, not white.
~~Yeast~~ Sourdough, please.
And this one is ***both***.

You can use underscores instead of asterisks too, so __bold__ and _italic_. In the middle of a word, though, only asterisks work.

Showing commands and file names exactly as they are

Whatever sits between two backticks is shown in a fixed font and exactly as it stands. That's handy for commands, file names and anything someone should copy exactly.

Start the container with `docker compose up -d`.
The file is called `docker-compose.yml`.

Showing a character without it doing anything

If you want an asterisk to appear simply as an asterisk, put a backslash in front of it. That works with every character that would otherwise mean something in Markdown.

Price: 4 \* 3 euros
\# is not a heading here