2.7. Markdown

Markdown is a light weight, HTML-like language that lets us format text, insert images, and create documents. This means that you won’t, for example, highlight a word and find the bold button in a menu bar. Instead, you will use the Markdown notation to indicate what formatting you would like. Once you learn Markdown, you’ll start to see it in more and more places. For example, there are many note taking apps that use it.

History of Markdown

Markdown was created in 2004 by John Gruber of Apple blogging fame and Aaron Swartz. You should be aware of Aaron Swartz’s tragic story, if you aren’t already.

Here’s a Markdown cheatsheet. You’ll get the hang of it very quickly.

I suggest starting at Datacamp for some examples of how to use Markdown in a Jupyter notebook. We’ll go through our own examples in class.

The Markdown Section from Coding for Economists is also great.

You can read more about how to use VS Code and Markdown.