The general concept in MultiMarkdown is that it should be easy for someone to type a plain text file that is human-readable, and then use the MultiMarkdown program to convert that text file into a more complicated computer language such as HTML or LaTeX. This allows you to create high quality output without having to spend hours and hours fiddling with font sizes, margins, etc.
The first step in learning to use MultiMarkdown is to learn how to use Markdown. MultiMarkdown is an extension to Markdown, and builds off of the basic fundamentals used in Markdown.
I recommend starting by familiarizing yourself with the Markdown basics and syntax pages.
Once you’re familiar with the basics of Markdown, it will be relatively easy to pick up the advanced features included in MultiMarkdown.
In order to include metadata information such as a title, the HTML document created by MultiMarkdown must be “complete.” This means that it starts with something that looks like (for HTML):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
If you include metadata in your document (with a few exceptions), then you will
generate a complete document. If you don’t include metadata, then you will
instead generate a “snippet.” The snippet will just include the relevant
portion of HTML, but will not include the <head>
or <body>
elements.
Metadata that is only intended to affect the way MultiMarkdown processes the
output will not trigger a complete document. Currently, this means you can use
Base Header Level
or Quotes Language
and still output a snippet if you
don’t include any other metadata.
Additionally, if you include (via [Transclusion]) a file that contains MultiMarkdown metadata, the metadata is stripped before being inserted into the parent document. This is slightly different than the idea of a snippet, but the effect of ignoring the metadata is similar.