Guides & How-to

Markdown cheat sheet

Every bit of formatting you need to write pages here, on one page.

Markdown is plain text with a few punctuation marks that mean “make this a heading” or “make this bold”. This page shows the syntax on the left of each example and what it produces underneath.

Headings

## Section heading
### Sub-heading
#### Small heading

Start at ##. The page title comes from the frontmatter and is already the #-level heading, so using # in the body gives you two competing titles.

Emphasis

**bold**  *italic*  `code`

bold, italic, code.

Lists

- First point
- Second point
  - An indented sub-point

1. First step
2. Second step
  • First point
  • Second point
    • An indented sub-point
  1. First step
  2. Second step
[Link to another wiki page](/subjects/maths/)
[Link to an external site](https://www.gov.uk/)

Internal links start with a slash and end with a slash: Link to another wiki page. External ones need the full https:// address: Link to an external site.

Quotes and callouts

> Anything after a > stands out from the body text.

Anything after a > stands out from the body text.

Tables

| Tier   | Paper | Calculator |
| ------ | ----- | ---------- |
| Higher | 1     | No         |
| Higher | 2     | Yes        |
Tier Paper Calculator
Higher 1 No
Higher 2 Yes

The dashes on the second line are what makes it a table. Columns don’t need to line up in the source — it only has to be valid, not tidy.

Horizontal rule

---

Three dashes on their own line, with a blank line above them.

Line breaks

A single newline does not break the line — Markdown joins them into one paragraph. Leave a blank line between paragraphs. For a hard break inside a paragraph, end the line with two spaces.

Code

Wrap a word in single backticks for inline code. For a block, fence it with three backticks:

```
No highlighting — just monospaced.
```

Images

![Description of the image](https://example.com/diagram.png)

The text in square brackets is what a screen reader announces, so write something useful rather than “image”.

Raw HTML

If Markdown can’t do it, paste HTML in directly — it passes straight through. This is the escape hatch for embedding a video mid-page.

The things that catch people out

  • Blank lines matter. A list or table pressed up against a paragraph above it may not render. Leave a blank line.
  • # in the body competes with the page title. Start at ##.
  • Frontmatter is fussy about indentation. Under videos: and files:, the - url: lines must line up with each other exactly. Copy an existing page rather than typing it fresh.
  • Apostrophes in frontmatter titles need the whole value in double quotes: title: "Tutor's guide".