title: Zettelmarkup: First Steps role: manual tags: #manual #tutorial #zettelmarkup #zettelstore syntax: zmk back: 00001007900000 backward: 00001007900000 00001007906000 box-number: 1 copyright: (c) 2020-present by Detlef Stern created: 20220810182917 forward: 00001007000000 00001007040000 00001007906000 lang: en license: EUPL-1.2-or-later modified: 20251218184537 published: 20251218184537 visibility: public [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 is 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: 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: Similar, an 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: --- After trying out these markup elements, you might want to continue with the [second steps](00001007906000).