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The Leanpub Flavoured Markdown Manual

Peter Armstrong

This is the manual for Leanpub Flavoured Markdown, which is one of the two plain-text writing modes on Leanpub.

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About

About

About the Book

This is the manual for Leanpub Flavoured Markdown, which is one of the two plain-text writing modes on Leanpub. Leanpub Flavoured Markdown came first; Markua is its replacement. Both LFM and Markua are dialects of Markdown. Markua is newer and better than LFM, but there are still some advanced features in Markua that aren't finished yet.

To write in LFM or Markua, you need to be in Dropbox, GitHub or Bitbucket writing mode, or you need to be writing in the Leanpub In-Browser Text Editor. The Leanpub Visual Editor, Google Docs and Bring Your Own Book mode do not support LFM or Markua formatting.

There are six good reasons to write a book in Markua:

1. Markua is better than LFM. A lot better. Markua fixes the many mistakes we made with LFM.

2. Markua is the future of Leanpub.

3. Markua has more features than LFM.

4. If you want to create a course on Leanpub, you need to use Markua.

5. The Leanpub In-Browser Text Editor is better with Markua now, and it's going to be way better soon. (We're working on an upgrade to the Leanpub In-Browser Text Editor which will only be available for Markua books.)

6. The Markua Manual is newer and better than the Leanpub Flavoured Markdown Manual.

There are two good reasons to write a book in LFM:

1. You already started your book in LFM and you don't want to convert it yet.

2. You are writing a translation of a book which is written in LFM.

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Author

About the Author

Peter Armstrong

Peter Armstrong is the founder and CEO of Leanpub. He has over two decades of experience in software, including eight years as a developer at Silicon Valley startups. He founded Ruboss in 2008, and launched Leanpub in 2010.

Peter coined the term Lean Publishing. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress book using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.

Peter is the creator of Markua, the Markdown dialect used on Leanpub. He is the author of a number of books, including Lean Publishing, Aphantasia and Programming for Kids. He has a BSc in Computer Science and Psychology from the University of Victoria, and he and his wife live in Victoria, BC.

Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Leanpub Flavoured Markdown vs. Markua
  2. Switching Writing Modes
  3. Scope of this Manual

Book.txt, Sample.txt and Manuscript Files

  1. The Book.txt File
  2. Book.txt and the manuscript Folder
  3. Making a Sample Book for Readers to Browse for Free
  4. The Sample Book
  5. Adding Images or Pictures to Your Book
  6. A Note About Character Encoding

How Markdown is Used in Leanpub

Attributes

Creating A New Book

  1. How To Set The Book’s Structure

Sample Books

  1. Why Sample Books?
  2. Consequences for Manuscripts

Images

  1. How To Insert An Image
  2. Image Format And Resolution
  3. Positioning An Image On The Page
  4. Floating images and lists

Languages and Letter Accents

  1. Setting the Main Language Used in the Book
  2. Overriding Leanpub Language Defaults
  3. Switching back and forth between language fonts
  4. A note about writing Leanpub books in Japanese, Korean and Chinese
  5. A note about writing Leanpub books in right-to-left (RTL) languages

Parts, Chapters and Sections

  1. Parts
  2. Chapters, Sections and Sub-sections
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Front Matter, Main Matter and Back Matter

Styling Text

  1. Bold, Emphasis/Italics, and Underlining
  2. Superscripts
  3. Monospaced Text
  4. Non-Breaking Spaces

Blocks Of Text

  1. Paragraphs
  2. Centering Paragraphs Or Lines Of Text
  3. Numbered/Ordered Lists
  4. Unordered/Bulleted Lists
  5. Definition Lists
  6. Blockquotes
  7. Asides/Sidebars
  8. Your title goes here.
  9. Your Aside title
  10. More Text Block Types
  11. Warning!
  12. This is a Warning
  13. Tips
  14. This is a Tip
  15. Errors
  16. This is an Error
  17. Information
  18. This is an Information box
  19. Questions
  20. This is a Question box
  21. Discussions
  22. This is a Discussion box
  23. Exercises
  24. This is an Exercise
  25. Generic Boxes

Code

  1. Code Samples
  2. Code Sample Titles
  3. Marking lines as deleted or added to a code block

Poetry

  1. Poetry Stanzas in Regular Markdown
  2. Spacing Control for Poetry
  3. Line Lengths

Links

  1. Formatting Links
  2. Long Hyperlinks
  3. Footnotes and Hyperlinks in PDF

Footnotes and Endnotes

  1. Footnotes
  2. Endnotes
  3. Remove Footnotes

Crosslinks

  1. Quick Explanation
  2. Longer Explanation
  3. Crosslinking to something with an ID
  4. Some Crosslink Details

Breaks

  1. Pagebreaks
  2. Line Breaks

Tables

  1. Table Width
  2. Multi-line rows
  3. Alignment and footer rows
  4. Table Titles
  5. HTML Tables
  6. A note on combining attributes

Miscellaneous

  1. Escaping Markdown Syntax Characters
  2. How To Exclude Lines From Your Book
  3. Mathematical Equations
  4. Curly Quotes
  5. Figure Captions and Labels
  6. Links In Footnotes
  7. Why can’t I put section commands in Book.txt?
  8. Trouble With Accents? Forcing Text Editors To Save As UTF-8
  9. I don’t understand how things get added to a Table of Contents
  10. What encoding should I use to write files in Markdown? Should I write in ASCII or UTF-8?
  11. How Can I Add Blank Lines To My Text?
  12. Adding a motto or epigraph to the beginning of a chapter
  13. Disabling Line Numbers While Nesting Code Blocks In Lists
  14. Indentation
  15. Hanging Indents
  16. Long strings of characters running off the right-hand side of the page / the right margin

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