Markdown

Markdown is a way of formatting 'plain text' such that it looks like 'rich text' (with bullets, headers, links, bold, italic etc.) This is how text formatting is administered in iThoughts topics and notes. Markdown was invented originally as a way for people to create web pages without needing to know anything about HTML (there are tools which convert Markdown into HTML.) It is now used all over the web as a 'standard' way of encoding rich text like formatting.

So what does Markdown lookalike?

This text contains **bold** and _italic_ text and bullet points as follows  
* bullet point  
* bullet point  
    1. numbered bullet point  
    1. numbered bullet point  
    1. numbered bullet point  

Finally there is a link to [this website](http://www.toketaware.com)`

iThoughts supports Markdown. If you type the above into a topic it looks like the following:

As you can see, the plain text (Markdown) looks very similar to the rich text as displayed in the topic. This makes it easy to add formatting to your topic and note text.

Drag/Drop/Copy/Paste

If you Drag/Drop or Copy/Paste text and links from websites and other documents into iThoughts then it will automatically translate the text formatting into Markdown. See below for an example:

Select some text from a website...

Drag/Drop or Copy/Paste it into a map and the formatting + links should remain.

Paste the text into a map - complete with formatting and links.

Edit the text and see that it's actually Markdown (see the ** either side of Charles John Huffman Dickens to indicate that it should be bold.)

Notes

Topic notes also support Markdown. They have the added benefit of supporting images and even embedded documents. The notes window in both iOS and Mac versions have 2 modes - Edit and View. In Edit mode, the text displayed is raw Markdown. In View mode, the text is converted to HTML and displayed as a web page (complete with clickable links and images etc.)

The following screenshots (click to enlarge) show the note text in Edit mode on the left and View mode on the right. See the button circled with red - this is how to toggle between modes.

The same is true with the iOS app (the red circle indicates how to switch between Edit and View modes.)

In addition to text and images, other documents can also be embedded into the Notes window.

On the Mac, ALT+Drag/Drop a file from Finder into the notes window and the document will be embedded into the map and a link created in the notes.

On iOS, use the Open in App feature available in Mail and most cloud apps (Dropbox etc) to send a file into iThoughts - then tap on the notes window and choose Paste.

Miscellany

If you want to use a character that also a Markdown formatter then you can 'escape it' by prefixing it with \
If you have v4 installed then you can download a demo map from here.
Some related links:
- Markdown spec + tutorial
- Markdown 'playground'

PS: iThoughts uses the CommonMark variant of Markdown.