All of the books we’ll be editing together will be in: Markdown. What’s Markdown? Good question! Markdown is a very simple format that allows us to have text that is both (a) very readable, and (b) easily convertible to a multitude of different formats.

You can go here to read about the basics of Markdown, but to give you some examples: to make something italics you put one asterisk on either side, like *this*. To make it bold, **two asterisks**. A blank line between each paragraph. And it goes on from there - super simple stuff that quickly becomes second nature.

And probably the most important thing for our purposes, headings in a Markdown file are done like this:

# Header 1

## Header 2

### Header 3

#### Header 4

##### Header 5

###### Header 6

And it’s as simple as that! Just start the heading line with the correct number of pound signs, and we’re good to go. Chapters will be first level headings in the DRL books, so that, along with italics (and some special use cases like poems) are the most common things you’ll see when you’re editing the raw book text - book publishers in the 1800s (when most of our sources were printed) didn’t use bold or have hyperlinks too often! 😉

So, as you can see, Markdown is super simple and easy - it’s just a plain text file with a little bit of markup. The files are small, it’s extremely flexible, and it’s easy to read for hours on end! And yet the benefits are profound - it allows going to the web, to ePub, to PDF, with very little additional work.

Be careful - once you get used to it you’ll be wanting to write everything in Markdown!