If you have ever opened a markdown cheat sheet and felt more confused than when you started, you are not alone. Most cheat sheets try to document the entire Markdown specification: dozens of edge cases, flavor-specific extensions, and escape rules you may never use. This one takes a different approach. It covers the roughly 20% of the syntax that handles 80% of everyday writing — headings, emphasis, links, images, lists, code, and tables — the subset bloggers, note-takers, and documentation writers reach for daily.
Markdown is a plain-text formatting language: you write with a few readable symbols, and a renderer converts them into clean HTML. No ribbons, no toolbars, no mouse gymnastics. Once the basics are in your fingers, you can draft a blog post in any text editor and paste it straight into WordPress, GitHub, or a static-site generator without touching a mouse. Bookmark this markdown cheat sheet and work through it once top to bottom — a single pass puts the core syntax in your fingers.
This markdown cheat sheet is built to be used, not just read: work through the sections below, then open our markdown editor and practice each one live — seeing the rendered output next to your typing is the fastest way to make the syntax stick.
Table of Contents
- The 20% of Markdown syntax that covers 80% of writing
- Markdown cheat sheet for bloggers
- Try it: practice in our live markdown editor
- What this cheat sheet deliberately leaves out
- Frequently Asked Questions
The 20% of Markdown syntax that covers 80% of writing
Headings
Headings use hash marks. One # is a top-level heading, two ## is a subheading, and so on down to six levels. Always leave a space between the hashes and the text.
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3Headings do double duty, which is why this markdown cheat sheet starts with them: they organize your document for readers and they become your page’s heading structure (<h1> through <h6>) in the rendered HTML. Keep one # per page as the title, then work downward in order — skipping levels (for example, jumping from ## to ####) makes documents harder to scan and hurts accessibility.
Bold and italic
Two asterisks wrap bold text; one asterisk wraps italic text. Underscores work the same way if you prefer them.
**bold** or __bold__
*italic* or _italic_
***bold and italic***Use bold to highlight key terms and short phrases, and italic for gentle emphasis, book titles, or foreign words. Long stretches of bold text are harder to read than plain text, so keep the emphasis sparing — if everything is emphasized, nothing is.
Links
Inline links are the most common kind — and the first entry in any markdown cheat sheet: square brackets hold the link text, parentheses hold the destination.
[GetAnythingPro free tools](https://getanythingpro.online/tools/)If you link to the same destination several times in a long document, reference-style links keep your prose readable. Define the destination once at the bottom of the page, then reuse the label:
Read our [markdown editor][editor] to practice.
Read the [official cheat sheet][editor] instead.
[editor]: /tools/markdown-editor/One honest caveat: most renderers open links in the same tab unless you add HTML attributes, and plain Markdown gives you no control over rel="nofollow" or target="_blank". If you need that control, a small inline HTML snippet is the pragmatic answer — Markdown passes raw HTML straight through.
Images
Image syntax is the next entry in this markdown cheat sheet: a link with an exclamation mark in front. The bracket text becomes the alt text, which screen readers announce and search engines read.
Writing meaningful alt text is not optional decoration — it is how visually impaired readers “see” your image and how search engines understand it. Describe what the image shows (“A bar chart of monthly sales rising through 2026”), not what it is (“image1”). If the image is purely decorative, an empty alt attribute (![]()) tells assistive technology to skip it.
Markdown has no native syntax for resizing or centering images. Those are styling decisions, and styling belongs to CSS — another case where a snippet of HTML is the honest solution.
Lists
Lists are a staple of every markdown cheat sheet: unordered lists use a hyphen, asterisk, or plus sign. Ordered lists use numbers followed by a period. Pick one style and stay consistent within a document.
- First item
- Second item
- Nested item (indent two spaces)
1. Step one
2. Step two
3. Step threeHandy trick: in an ordered list, most renderers number the items automatically, so you can write every item as 1. and reorder freely without renumbering. Indent nested items by two spaces (four also works in some renderers; two is the safest).
GitHub-style task lists add checkboxes with square brackets:
- [ ] Draft the post
- [x] Publish the postCode
Code formatting is where a markdown cheat sheet earns its keep: single backticks for inline code, triple backticks for fenced blocks:
Use the `printf` function for output.
```python
def greet(name):
print(f"Hello, {name}")
```Naming the language after the opening fence (```python) enables syntax highlighting in most renderers — a small effort that makes code blocks dramatically more readable. If your code block itself contains backticks, open and close the fence with four backticks instead of three.
Tables
Tables are the one part of this markdown cheat sheet that feels fiddly the first time, but they follow a simple pattern: pipes separate columns, and a row of dashes defines the header.
| Tool | Use it for |
|------|------------|
| Markdown editor | Writing and previewing |
| PDF to Markdown | Converting documents |Alignment is controlled with colons in the separator row: |:---| left, |:---:| center, |---:| right. Tables shine for compact comparisons and specs; for long-form content, a list reads better on small screens, where wide tables can force horizontal scrolling.
Blockquotes and dividers
Near the end of this markdown cheat sheet, a greater-than sign creates a quoted block — useful for callouts, cited passages, and short notes set apart from the body:
> The best writing tool is the one you actually use.Three or more hyphens (or asterisks) on their own line draw a horizontal rule that separates sections. Keep a blank line before and after it so renderers do not mistake it for part of a heading or list.
---Markdown cheat sheet for bloggers
If you publish on WordPress, this markdown cheat sheet is the subset that covers nearly every post you will ever write. Your workflow looks like this: draft in Markdown, paste into the block editor or a Markdown-enabled theme, then do a final visual check.
Headings are your SEO structure. Search engines use your heading hierarchy to understand a post’s outline. Write descriptive headings that include your topic’s key phrases naturally — exactly what this markdown cheat sheet does. One # becomes your post title; ## sections become your subtopics.
Images need alt text, every time. Blog platforms turn your  into <img alt="...">, and that alt text is read by both screen readers and search crawlers. It is also your fallback when an image fails to load.
Lists and tables carry skimmability. Most readers scan before they commit. Turning a dense paragraph into a list, or a comparison into a table, respects that habit and keeps bounce rates down.
Links build your internal network. Every post should link to related content on your site — relevant tool pages, earlier posts, your categories. Linking within Markdown is so cheap there is no excuse to skip it. This post, for example, points you to the tools below, and our other guides link back here — that web of internal links helps readers (and search engines) discover more of the site.
Draft messy, clean before publishing. Markdown makes it easy to accumulate stray blank lines, inconsistent spacing, and leftover HTML when you copy from other sources. Running your draft through our text cleaner before publishing strips that noise in one click.
Try it: practice in our live markdown editor
Reading syntax rules is useful; typing them is what builds the habit. Our markdown editor is the hands-on companion to this markdown cheat sheet: type Markdown on one side, watch the rendered result on the other, and export clean HTML when you are done. Everything runs in your browser — your text is not sent to our servers.
Try this five-minute drill: recreate one section of this article in the editor. Type a ## heading, add a bold sentence, insert a link, build a three-row table, and finish with a blockquote. If the preview shows exactly what you expected, the syntax is yours. If something looks off, compare your typing with the examples above — nine times out of ten it is a missing space after the hashes or a blank line around a block element.
Working the other direction? If you already have a PDF — an old report, a manual, a scanned handout — and you want it as editable Markdown, our PDF to Markdown converter extracts the text and structures it into Markdown so you can refine it in the editor instead of retyping.
What this cheat sheet deliberately leaves out
Honesty matters here: this is a task-oriented subset, not the full specification. It skips footnotes, definition lists, strikethrough, subscript and superscript, math notation, diagram blocks, and the dozen flavor-specific extensions that differ between GitHub, Obsidian, and static-site generators. It also skips deep edge cases like reference-link edge behavior and nested emphasis parsing.
That is by design. The 20% in this markdown cheat sheet handles the overwhelming majority of real writing, and learning it first means the advanced features make sense when you eventually need them. When you are ready for the complete reference, the canonical Markdown Guide cheat sheet documents the full syntax across flavors — it is the standard reference this post defers to.
Keep this markdown cheat sheet open in a tab while you write your next post — glancing at a syntax reminder beats guessing, and after a week of real writing you will not need the tab anymore.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Markdown hard to learn?
No. The subset in this markdown cheat sheet — headings, emphasis, links, images, lists, code, and tables — takes most people under an hour to learn and a few days of practice to make automatic. Start by writing one real document in Markdown instead of memorizing rules; muscle memory does the rest.
Can I use Markdown in WordPress?
Yes. Several WordPress setups support it: the Jetpack Markdown block, Markdown-enabled themes, and plugins that convert Markdown to blocks on paste. A common workflow is drafting in a Markdown editor and pasting the rendered HTML into the block editor, which preserves headings, lists, links, and formatting.
What is the difference between Markdown and HTML?
Markdown is a shorthand that converts to HTML. You write **bold** and the renderer outputs <strong>bold</strong>. Markdown covers everyday formatting quickly; HTML handles everything else. The two mix freely — Markdown passes raw HTML through untouched, which is the standard escape hatch for image sizing, custom classes, and link attributes.
Do all Markdown flavors support the same syntax?
No. The core syntax in this markdown cheat sheet works in nearly every renderer, but extensions — tables (technically an extension of original Markdown), task lists, footnotes, strikethrough — vary between GitHub Flavored Markdown, CommonMark, Obsidian, and others. Stick to the basics for maximum portability and test extensions in your target platform.
How do I convert a PDF to Markdown?
Use a converter that extracts the document’s text and rebuilds its structure — headings, lists, and tables — as Markdown syntax. Our PDF to Markdown tool does this in the browser: upload a PDF, get editable Markdown you can refine in the markdown editor instead of retyping the whole document.
Where can I practice Markdown online?
In a live editor with a side-by-side preview, so you see the result as you type. Our markdown editor is built for exactly that: type on the left, watch the rendered output on the right, and export HTML when you are finished.