The Leanpub Flavoured Markdown Manual
Free!
With Membership
$7.99
Minimum paid price

The Leanpub Flavoured Markdown Manual

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.

About the Author

Peter Armstrong
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.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
    • Leanpub Flavoured Markdown vs. Markua
    • Switching Writing Modes
    • Scope of this Manual
  • Book.txt, Sample.txt and Manuscript Files
    • The Book.txt File
    • Making a Sample Book for Readers to Browse for Free
    • Adding Images or Pictures to Your Book
    • A Note About Character Encoding
  • How Markdown is Used in Leanpub
  • Attributes
  • Creating A New Book
    • How To Set The Book’s Structure
  • Sample Books
    • Why Sample Books?
    • Consequences for Manuscripts
  • Images
    • How To Insert An Image
    • Image Format And Resolution
    • Positioning An Image On The Page
  • Languages and Letter Accents
    • Setting the Main Language Used in the Book
    • Overriding Leanpub Language Defaults
    • Switching back and forth between language fonts
    • A note about writing Leanpub books in Japanese, Korean and Chinese
    • A note about writing Leanpub books in right-to-left (RTL) languages
  • Parts, Chapters and Sections
    • Parts
    • Chapters, Sections and Sub-sections
    • Table of Contents
    • Front Matter, Main Matter and Back Matter
  • Styling Text
    • Bold, Emphasis/Italics, and Underlining
    • Superscripts
    • Monospaced Text
    • Non-Breaking Spaces
  • Blocks Of Text
    • Paragraphs
    • Centering Paragraphs Or Lines Of Text
    • Numbered/Ordered Lists
    • Unordered/Bulleted Lists
    • Definition Lists
    • Blockquotes
    • Asides/Sidebars
    • More Text Block Types
    • Warning!
    • Tips
    • Errors
    • Information
    • Questions
    • Discussions
    • Exercises
    • Generic Boxes
  • Code
    • Code Samples
    • Code Sample Titles
    • Marking lines as deleted or added to a code block
  • Poetry
    • Poetry Stanzas in Regular Markdown
    • Spacing Control for Poetry
    • Line Lengths
  • Links
    • Formatting Links
    • Long Hyperlinks
    • Footnotes and Hyperlinks in PDF
  • Footnotes and Endnotes
    • Footnotes
    • Endnotes
    • Remove Footnotes
  • Crosslinks
    • Quick Explanation
    • Longer Explanation
    • Crosslinking to something with an ID
    • Some Crosslink Details
  • Breaks
    • Pagebreaks
    • Line Breaks
  • Tables
    • Table Width
    • Multi-line rows
    • Alignment and footer rows
    • Table Titles
    • HTML Tables
    • A note on combining attributes
  • Miscellaneous
    • Escaping Markdown Syntax Characters
    • How To Exclude Lines From Your Book
    • Mathematical Equations
    • Curly Quotes
    • Figure Captions and Labels
    • Links In Footnotes
    • Why can’t I put section commands in Book.txt?
    • Trouble With Accents? Forcing Text Editors To Save As UTF-8
    • I don’t understand how things get added to a Table of Contents
    • What encoding should I use to write files in Markdown? Should I write in ASCII or UTF-8?
    • How Can I Add Blank Lines To My Text?
    • Adding a motto or epigraph to the beginning of a chapter
    • Disabling Line Numbers While Nesting Code Blocks In Lists
    • Indentation
    • Hanging Indents
    • Long strings of characters running off the right-hand side of the page / the right margin
  • Notes

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub