[Zettelmarkup](00001007000000) allows you to leave your text as it is, at least in many situations.
Some characters have a special meaning, but you have to enter them in a defined way to see a visible change.
Zettelmarkup is designed to be used for zettel, which are relatively short.
It allows to produce longer texts, but you should probably use a different tool, if you want to produce a scientific paper, to name an example.

# Paragraphs

The most important concept of Zettelmarkup is the *paragraph*.
Ordinary text is interpreted as part of a paragraph.
Paragraphs are typically separated by one or more blank lines.

Therefore, line endings are more or less ignored within one paragraph.
Zettelmarkup will recognize the end of a line, and store it as a “soft break”.
A soft break is rendered in most cases as a space character.

Within a paragraph you can style your text with [special markup](00001007040000).
Some examples:

| Zettelmarkup | Rendered output | Instruction |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `An __emphasized__ word` | An *emphasized* word | Put two underscore characters before and after the text you want to emphasize |
| `Someone uses **bold** text` | Someone uses __bold__ text | Put two asterisks before and after the text you want to see bold |
| `He says: ""I love you!""` | He says: “I love you!” | Put two quotation mark characters before and after the text you want to quote. |

You probably see a principle.

One nice thing about the quotation mark characters: they are rendered according to the current language.
Examples: “english”, « french », „german“.
You will see later, how to change the current language.

# Lists

Quite often, text consists of lists.
Zettelmarkup supports different types of lists.
The most important lists are:

* Unnumbered lists,
* Numbered lists.

You produce an unnumbered list element by writing an asterisk character followed by a space character at the beginning of a line.
Since a list typically consists of more than one element, the following elements will also start at their own line:

    * First item
    * Second item
    * Third item

This is rendered as:

* First item
* Second item
* Third item

Similar, a numbered list element begins a line with the number sign (sic!) followed by a space character:

    # First item
    # Second item
    # Third item

This is rendered as:

1. First item
1. Second item
1. Third item

---

After trying out these markup elements, you might want to continue with the [second steps](00001007906000).