Tips and Tricks 2: Style your text with markdown

Hello everyone,

Today we'll talk about how to use markdown in your text. Markdown is a simple formatting language that allows you to add rich formatting to your plain text. In Backstage, you can use markdown when you write your announcements, messages in discussion channels, comments for images in the gallery, and body text in the custom sections of your microsite.

The table below shows how to enclose words or phrases between specific sets of characters to apply the associated format to that text in markdown.

Format style	Markdown syntax
Bold	text
Italic	text
Strike	~~text~~
Inline	`text`
Blockquote	>text
Link	[text](URL)
Image	![alternateText](URL "hoverText")

Bold, italics, and strike:

Use the markdown structure for bold, italics, and strike to add emphasis to your text. To make your text bold, enclose it between double asterisks. To make text italic, enclose it between single asterisks. To strike through text, enclose it between double tilde symbols.

Inline:

Highlight words in your text using the markdown structure for inline code. Enclose your text between backticks.

Blockquote:

Set important quotes apart from the rest of the text using the blockquote markdown structure. Add a greater-than sign before your text to indent it in a separate block.

Link:

Link a word or a phrase to a different page to add more information to your text. Add the text that you want to add the link to between square brackets, and immediately follow it with the URL in parenthesis. This will display the text as a link, which will lead the visitor to the page at the specified URL when they click it.

Image:

Embed an image in the text area of any section. Start with an exclamation mark followed by the alternate text for the image in square brackets and the URL of the image in parentheses. You can also choose to add a title for the image in quotes after the URL in parentheses.