title: Zettelmarkup: First Steps
role: manual
tags: #manual #tutorial #zettelmarkup #zettelstore
syntax: zmk

[[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]].