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 <ds@zettelstore.de>
created: 20220810182917
forward: 00001007000000 00001007040000 00001007906000
lang: en
license: EUPL-1.2-or-later
modified: 20231201135849
published: 20231201135849
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 an 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 sore 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!""''|Her 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""{lang="en"}, ""french""{lang="fr"}, ""german""{lang="de"}.
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:
```{="zmk"}
* First item
* Second item
* Third item
```
This is rendered as:
:::{="example"}
* First item
* Second item
* Third item
:::
Similar, an numbered list element begins a line with the number sign (sic!) followed by a space character:
```{="zmk"}
# First item
# Second item
# Third item
```
This is rendered as:
:::{="example"}
# First item
# Second item
# Third item
:::
---
After trying out these markup elements, you might want to continue with the [[second steps|00001007906000]].