Markdown Editor & Preview

Subtle rules that trip people up. A blank line is required between paragraphs; consecutive non-blank lines of text with no intervening blank are a single paragraph with soft line breaks, which most renderers treat as single spaces. A line ending in two spaces before the newline is a hard line break; this is a common bug because trailing whitespace is invisible in most editors. Links can be written inline as `[text](url)` or as reference-style links like `[text][ref]` with `[ref]: url` defined elsewhere in the document; reference style is preferred for documents with many links because it keeps the prose readable. Images use the same syntax prefixed with `!`.

Fenced code blocks with a language identifier enable syntax highlighting. The identifier maps to a grammar in the highlighting engine (this tool uses Prism or highlight.js depending on build); common identifiers like `js``python``bash``sql``json`and `yaml` work out of the box. Unknown identifiers fall back to plain text. Indentation-style code blocks (four-space or tab-indented) are legacy from original Markdown and are still supported, but fenced blocks are clearer and support language hints, so prefer them for new documents.

Escaping is the other frequent source of confusion. Backslash escapes (`\*` for a literal asterisk, `\[` for a literal bracket) work in most positions but not inside code spans or code blocks, where escaping is unnecessary because the content is treated as literal. HTML is permitted inline and generally passed through unchanged, which lets you fall through to raw HTML when Markdown does not support what you need (nested lists inside tables, specific layout attributes, embedded iframes). This passthrough is a security consideration when rendering untrusted Markdown, many renderers sanitize or disable raw HTML when displaying user content. For drafting your own documents in this preview, raw HTML works and can be useful when Markdown cannot express what you want.