Notebooks support formatted texts, indented lists and embedded images through Markdown, a very simple set of rules you apply to plain text, and which are then converted to HTML. This has several advantages:

1. •The documents are always easily readable.
   

2. •After conversion, documents are perfectly valid HTML that you can mail, print, share, sync etc.
   

3. •The documents remain in a standard format (either plain text or HTML) and can be reused and edited on the computer, without the need of any dedicated software (Pages etc.)
   

4. •Additional tools are available to convert Markdown documents to RTF or even PDF on a computer. Notebooks and Markdown can be a good starting point for a publishing process. (see MultiMarkdown)
   

Convert a Plain Text Document to a Formatted Document

There are two options to convert a plain text document to a formatted document:

1. •When you tap any of Notebooks' extra formatting keys (bold, italic, underlined, insert image or link), Notebooks knows that you are about to create a Markdown document and converts it when you hide the keyboard. This automatic conversion can be disabled in settings.
   

2. •Select “Format Document” from the Action menu.
   

Formatted documents do not use the background pattern you may have selected for your plain text documents. The reason is that the line spacing is very uneven in formatted documents, and displaying them on a regularly checked or ruled background would look very odd.

Switch between Formatted and Editable Versions

1. •To edit a formatted document, select Edit from the action menu or tap the text three times.
   

2. •To return to the formatted view, hide the keyboard or simply move to a different note. This will also commit the changes you made.
   

Convert a Formatted Document to Plain Text

If you converted a note to a formatted document by accident, use the action Copy as Plain Text to create an unformatted copy. If you no longer need the formatted version you can delete it.

Modify a Formatted Document on your Computer

Formatted documents are stored as HTML and will by default open in a browser on your computer. To edit, open those documents in a text editor instead (please make sure that this editor ignores HTML formatting).

You find the Markdown text in an HTML comment at the very beginning of the document, delimited by

<-- Plain Text Representation
your text
-->

You can change and edit your text, but please bear in mind a few things:

1. •You may remove the delimiting lines and the HTML part, just leaving the plain Markdown text; Notebooks will rebuild the formatted HTML.
   

2. •If you do not delete that, please make sure not to change or delete the delimiting lines.
   

3. •Any changes that you make to the HTML portion of the document will be ignored and overwritten by Notebooks.
   

The next time you open this document in Notebooks, it will be converted to HTML again, reflecting all changes you have made.

The Markdown Syntax

Now to the core of Markdown, its syntax. The list might look extensive (and thus a bit intimidating), but the most important options are available through Notebooks' extra keys anyway. It might still be good to know what else Markdown and Notebooks have to offer.

For the details, please let us refer you to John Gruber’s website.

Additional Options

Notebooks uses Discount, an open source Markdown converter by David Parson. Discount supports a few extras which are not available in standard Markdown. The most important are:

Centered Alignment

To center a paragraph, just frame it with –> and <–

->This is a centered paragraph<-

Tables

They follow the definition from Michael Fortin’s PHP Markdown

First Header  | Second Header

------------- | -------------

Content Cell  | Content Cell

Content Cell  | Content Cell

Footnotes

Some text with a footnote.[^1]

[^1]: Here is the footnote.