This is an extension of the demo post from Dean’s website that demostrates some key markdown syntax to use in markdown blog posts for this site (and many other great tools).

Simple syntax

There are many resources and blogs about how to use markdown. Here is a 5 minutes guide to writing in markdown - it’ll teach you how to transform regular text into bold/italics/headings/tables/etc. Here are some quick notes.

Text modifications

Bold text is defined by **: Here is some bold text

Headings are defined by the number of # before a line of text. For example ##### Here is a fifth level heading is needed and then the rendered document will have a fifth level heading as below.

Heading (Here is a secondary heading (##))

and a sixth heading by ######. This is the max level for a heading by the way…

Here is a third heading

Including code

One of the greatest strengths of markdown extensions such as RMarkdown is the ability to include code chunks within normal text as below:

var foo = function(x) {
  return(x + 5);
}
foo(3)

And here is the same code with syntax highlighting:

var foo = function(x) {
  return(x + 5);
}
foo(3)

And here is the same code yet again but with line numbers:

1
2
3
4
var foo = function(x) {
  return(x + 5);
}
foo(3)

Boxes

You can add notification, warning and error boxes like this:

Notification, warning and error boxes

{: .box-note} ; {: .box-warning}; {: .box-error} demos below:

Note: This is a notification box.

Working with images

You can set following yaml variables: layout: post; tags: <tagg_label>

Images

Images live in the ./assets/img/ folder following the same rules as the beautiful jekyll template. Overall jekyll uses liquid tags to and these usually found in the assets folder.

Classic markdown image syntax

How about a yummy crepe? Here are two sections of code for working with markdown syntax (code). It can also be centered using {: .mx-auto.d-block :}

Tables

Tables can be directly written using markdown syntax or can be built in code and rendered to markdown using a package like knitr in R.

Markdown tables

Markdown tables can be difficult to keep formatted. Here’s a demo markdown table:

RMarkdown tables

An advantage of RMarkdown is that you can build autogenerating markdown tables using a range of packages including knitr.