Text Formatting

Markua’s goal is to provide all the semantic formatting required by authors. Formatting that could be done by a book designer without needing to discuss it with the author is considered orthogonal to Markua, and is largely omitted from Markua.

Markua is a plain text format designed for the writing of books. Books have various types of text formatting in them: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript.

Here’s how to do basic, semantic text formatting.

Italic

To produce italic text, surround it with *one asterisk*.

Underlined

To produce underlined text, surround it with _one underscore_. (You can force all underlines to produce italic text, however. Just go to Author > Books > (your book) > Settings > Generation Settings on Leanpub, and select the Italicize Underlines checkbox.

Bold

To produce bold text, surround it with either **two asterisks** or __two underscores__.

Bold + Italic

To produce bold + italic text, surround it with ***three asterisks***.

Bold + Underlined

To produce bold + underlined text, surround it with ___three underscores___. (Also, go to Author > Books > (your book) > Settings > Generation Settings on Leanpub and ensure that the Italicize Underlines checkbox is not selected.)

Bold + Italic + Underlined

To produce bold + italic + underlined text, surround it with _***a combination of one underscore and three asterisks***_, making sure to have the underscores on the outside. Conceptually, this is simple: you just make ***bold + italic text***, and then surround that text with _one underscore_ for the underline. (Also, go to Author > Books > (your book) > Settings > Generation Settings on Leanpub and ensure that the Italicize Underlines checkbox is not selected.)

Strikethrough

To produce strikethrough text, surround it with ~~two tildes~~.

Superscript

To produce superscript like the 3 in 5³ = 125, surround it with carets like 5^3^ = 125.

Subscript

To produce subscript like the 2 in H₂O, surround it with single tildes like H~2~O.