With Markdown text formatting, you can easily make text bold or italicized using asterisks.

• For bold text, type two asterisks (**) before and after the text you want to make bold.

  **This text will appear bold.**

• For italics, type a single asterisk (*) before and after the text you want to italicize.

  *This text will appear italicized.*

To create bullet points in Markdown, you can use either asterisks or dashes. Be sure to include a space between the asterisk/dash and the text, and to add a blank line before the first bullet point. Otherwise, the list will not be formatted correctly.

* Bullet point

and

- Bullet point

will both appear as:

• Bullet point

Use the same rules as above for numbered lists.

1. Rule one
2. Rule two
3. Rule three

will appear as:

1. Rule one
2. Rule two
3. Rule three

Markdown can also be used to to create text that links to a web address, like this link to the Google homepage.

To create a link in Markdown, use square brackets to define the text you want to turn into a link, and parentheses to define the URL to which the text will link. There should be no space between the closing bracket and the opening parenthesis.

For example:

[FareHarbor Help](http://fareharbor.com/help/)

creates the link:

FareHarbor Help

The Markdown syntax for images is similar to the syntax for links. Type an exclamation mark followed by the image name and URL:

![Descriptive text](image URL)

For instance, the image at the top of this page looks like this in Markdown:

![Preview Markdown](https://bit.ly/2IcHoYG)

Uploading images in FareHarbor

On Markdown-enabled fields in FareHarbor, you can upload an image or file and it will automatically get converted into Markdown. Click the Upload icon, choose your file, and enter an image name in between the brackets.

Descriptive text

For accessibility purposes, descriptive text (aka “alt text”) should describe the image as concisely as possible. Descriptive text should not include “picture of” or “image of.” This text will display in emails if the image does not load. Decorative images that do not convey any important information can have empty alt text: ![](image URL)

In addition, if the Markdown syntax is entered without the opening exclamation point, it appears as a standard link to the photo using the image name:

Preview Markdown

Linking an image to a webpage

To make an image link to a page, you can use the following syntax:

[![image description](image URL)](webpage URL)

For example,

[![Logo](https://bit.ly/2G3gMak)](https://fareharbor.com)

creates an image of the FareHarbor logo that links to the FareHarbor homepage:

While you can’t change the font size like you would in a word processor, Markdown does allow you to create headers in various sizes in order to format your content consistently. This is done by using hash (#) symbols in front of the header name. The number of hashes corresponds to the header level.

H1 Header

In descriptions, confirmation notes, and canned messages, H1 headers will appear in large text. When added to various parts of your booking process, these headers can be used to break up text into easy-to-read sections. For an H1 header, type # Text and replace “Text” with the name of your header.

H2 Header

In descriptions, confirmation notes, and canned messages, H2 headers are roughly the same size as H1 headers. For an H2 header, type ## Text and replace “Text” with the name of your header.

H3 Header

H3 headers are smaller than H1 and H2 headers For an H3 header, type ### Text and replace “Text” with the name of your header.

You can add a horizontal line like the one in the image below by placing three or more hyphens (---), asterisks (***), or underscores (___) on a line by themselves.

This can be handy when you want to split up information into more visible sections. Please note, horizontal lines should be avoided when building a dashboard. If you’re having trouble getting the horizontal line to appear, try adding an extra line of blank space above and below.

Note: Page breaks should be used sparingly. Instead, use header markdown to emphasize the start of each section. See Tips for writing item descriptions for more information.

In addition to using Markdown to format messages to customers, booking forms, and your FareHarbor profile, you may also introduce Markdown to your item listing descriptions using the Content Builder.

Your content builder Markdown will differ in appearance from Markdown added in other areas of the FareHarbor product. Below are the standard and Content Builder CSS rules associated with each Markdown rule:

The capabilities demonstrated above will satisfy most of the Markdown requirements of working with FareHarbor. If you would like to know more, visit the website Daring Fireball, by Markdown’s creator, John Gruber.

Adding a > symbol in front of a paragraph or line of text will create an HTML element called a blockquote, which can be used as a method to style callouts.

Since a blockquote is semantically intended to display a quotation, we recommend using them sparingly for the purposes of a callout.

Syntax requirements:

• Make sure there is an empty line preceding the blockquote.
• A > on a line by itself preceding the content will not work.

Markdown for HTML email might render slightly different code than what you see in the preview. Make sure to follow these guidelines when writing markdown for email to ensure consistency:

• Nesting bold in italics with asterisks (***bold** in italics*) will not render italics in email. Instead, use double underscores for bold: *__bold__ in italics*.
• Emails with two underscores will italicize the word in between the underscores. To fix this add a backslash before each underscore. Renders: example_test_email@email.com
• Lists need to have an empty line above the first item to output correctly for email
• Any text or formatting that follows a semicolon (;) will not render in the email preview. (Note: the text and formatting renders as expected in the live email.)

We have seen instances where indenting text (inserting 4 spaces at the beginning of a line) in company cancellation notes or custom field descriptions can cause a company’s online book form to break:

To fix this, go to the company’s Dashboard, find the Markdown field that’s causing the problem, and get rid of the space at the beginning of the line.