--- date: "2025-04-05T00:00:00+08:00" slug: "markdown" --- # Markdown Gitea uses MarkDown structured text in many places, you can recognise it by the `.md` file extension. Markdown is plain text format for writing structured documents, allowing one to write "plain" text files that nonetheless have _"fancy"_ **formatting**, while still keeping the plain-text version readable. Unfortunately, due to historical implementation differences, many subtle dialects exist. To avoid adding to the confusion, Gitea tries to follow "[GitHub Flavoured Markdown (GFM)](https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown/)" as close as possible. "GFM" is an extension on top of the rigorously-specified [CommonMark](https://commonmark.org/) standard. CommonMark flavours are used by most major web platforms (e.g. Reddit, Stack Overflow, Discourse) and git forges (GitHub, GitLab and our very own Gitea), thus you shouldn't run into any surprises with Gitea. For a quick introduction to the syntax and features of GitHub Flavoured Markdown, see the GitHub documentation: - [Basic formatting](https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/getting-started-with-writing-and-formatting-on-github/basic-writing-and-formatting-syntax) - [Advanced formatting](https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/working-with-advanced-formatting) For a deeper history about CommonMark, its spec, and its reason for existence, see [CommonMark.org](https://commonmark.org/). ## Rendering options Some Gitea's markdown rendering behaviors can be fine-tuned by global config options, see the `[markdown]` config section in the `app.example.ini` ## Link path resolving When rendering links for ``, `` and `