The Leanpub Flavoured Markdown Manual
Last updated on 2019-06-24
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 Authors
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
Authors have earned$8,090,162writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub,
earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Free Updates. Free App. 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), EPUB (for phones and tablets), MOBI (for Kindle) and in the free Leanpub App (for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android). 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
