Appendix F — Extras: Markdown syntax

There is a lot more Markdown syntax that let’s you do quite a bit for formatting. Quarto’s Markdown Basics page is a good reference for learning more. We only will cover and demonstrate the syntax above in the course, however, below are some additional things you can do with Markdown.

F.1 Block quotes

Block quotes are used when you want to emphasize a block of text, usually for quoting someone. You create a block quote by putting a > at the beginning of the line, and as with the lists and headers, it needs empty lines before and after the text. So it looks like this:

> Block quote 

which gives…

Block quote

F.2 Adding footnotes

Footnotes are added by enclosing a number or word in square brackets ([]) and beginning with an uptick (^). It looks like this:

Footnote[^1] or this[^note].

[^1]: Footnote content
[^note]: Another footnote

which gives…

Footnote¹ or this².

¹ Footnote content

² Another footnote

Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see these footnotes.

F.3 Adding links to websites

Including a link to a website in your document is done by surrounding the link text with square brackets ([]) followed by the link URL in brackets (()). There must not be any space between the square brackets and the regular brackets (it should look like []()).

[Link](https://google.com)

which gives…

Link

F.4 Inserting (simple) tables

While you can insert tables using Markdown too, it isn’t recommended to do that for complicated or large tables. Tables are created by separating columns with |, with the table header being separated by a line that looks like |:--|. A simple example is:

|   | Fun | Serious |
|:--|----:|--------:|
| **Happy** | 1234 | 5678 |
| **Sad** | 123 | 456 |

which gives…

	Fun	Serious
Happy	1234	5678
Sad	123	456

The |---:| or |:---| tell the table to left-align or right-align the values in the column. Center-align is |:----:|.

So you can probably imagine, doing this for larger or even slightly more complicated tables is not practical. A good alternative approach is to create the table in a spreadsheet, importing that table into R within a code chunk, and using knitr::kable() to create the table after that.