Curated uses Markdown for the text fields you write by hand: item descriptions and footers, your publication description, header and footer text, subscription messages, and your custom terms. Any field with a Markdown Support link below it accepts the formatting on this page.

Markdown is plain text. You type a few symbols, and Curated turns them into formatted HTML when it renders the web and email versions of your issue.

Links

Write a link with the text in square brackets and the address in parentheses:

Read [the announcement](https://example.com/post) for the details.

You can also define the address separately and refer to it by name. This is useful when you use the same link twice:

Read [the announcement][post] for the details.

[post]: https://example.com/post

Both forms work. Curated rewrites every link in an item into a short cur.at link so that it can count clicks, so use Markdown links rather than pasting a bare address.

Note: a bare address on its own is not turned into a link. Wrap it in angle brackets if you want the address itself to be clickable:

<https://example.com/post>

Emphasis

*italic* or _italic_
**bold** or __bold__

Headings

Put one to six # characters at the start of a line:

## A section heading
### A smaller heading

Lists

Start each line of a bulleted list with -, *, or +:

- First point
- Second point

Start each line of a numbered list with a number and a period:

1. First step
2. Second step

Quotes

Start the line with >:

> The best newsletter I read all week.

Code

Wrap inline code in single backticks:

Run `bundle install` first.

For a block of code, indent every line by four spaces:

    def hello
      puts "hi"
    end

Horizontal rules

Put three or more dashes on a line of their own:

---

Line breaks

A blank line starts a new paragraph. To break a line inside the same paragraph, end the line with two spaces.

What Curated does not support

Curated uses a conservative Markdown dialect, so several extensions you may know from other tools are not available:

  • Tables. Pipe tables are printed as plain text.
  • Fenced code blocks. Three backticks do not start a code block. Indent by four spaces instead.
  • Strikethrough. ~~text~~ is printed as plain text.
  • Automatic links. A bare address stays plain text. Use [text](address) or <address>.
  • Raw HTML. HTML tags are removed before the text is rendered. Write Markdown instead.
  • Inline images. ![alt](address) does not produce an image. Use the image uploader on the item instead. See Images and Video for the image sizes we recommend.

Escaping a symbol

To show a Markdown symbol instead of applying it, put a backslash in front of it:

\*this stays between asterisks\*