Working with Markdown Features

What is this page about?

This page explains how to work with Markdown features when loading or saving Markdown.

This topic discusses how to implement Markdown features using Aspose.Words. Markdown is a simple way to format plain text that can easily be converted to HTML. Aspose.Words supports the following Markdown features:

• Headings
• Blockquotes
• Horizontal rules
• Bold emphasis
• Italic emphasis

The Markdown feature implementation mostly follows the CommonMark specification in Aspose.Words API and all the features are represented as corresponding styles or direct formatting. Which means that

• Bold and Italic are represented as Font.Bold and Font.Italic. 
• Headings are paragraphs with Heading 1 - Heading 6 styles. 
• Quotes are paragraphs with “Quote” in the style name. 
• HorizontalRule is a paragraph with HorizontalRule shape.

There are nuances of translating Markdown to the Aspose.Words Document Object Model (DOM), described in the article Translate Markdown to Document Object Model (DOM).

Markdown Document with Emphases

This section demonstrates you how to produce a markdown document with emphases as given below:

Markdown treats asterisks (*) and underscores (_) as indicators of emphasis.
You can write **bold** or *italic* text. 
You can also write ***BoldItalic*** text.

The following code snippet can be used to produce the above given markdown document.

Markdown Document with Headings

This section demonstrates you how to produce a markdown document with headings as given below:

The following produces headings:
# Heading1
## Heading2
### Heading3
#### Heading4
##### Heading5
###### Heading6
# **Bold Heading1**

The following code snippet can be used to produce the above given markdown document.

Markdown Document with Block Quotes

This section demonstrates you how to produce a markdown document with block quotes as given below:

> *Blockquote*
>> *1. Nested blockquote*
>>
>

The following code snippet can be used to produce the above given markdown document.

Markdown Document with Horizontal Rule

This section demonstrates you how to produce a markdown document with Horizontal Rule as given below:

Insert a horizontal rule shape into the document.
-----

The following code snippet can be used to produce the above given markdown document.

Reading a Markdown Document

The following code snippet shows you how to read a markdown document.

Specify Markdown Save Options

Aspose.Words API provides MarkdownSaveOptions class to specify additional options while saving a document into the Markdown format.

The following code example demonstrated how to specify various Markdown save options.

How to Align Content Inside the Table while Exporting into Markdown

Aspose.Words API provides TableContentAlignment enumeration which defines alignment directions to align contents in tables while exporting into the Markdown document. The following code example demonstrates how to align content inside the table.

---

FAQ

1. Q: How do I apply bold or italic formatting when generating Markdown with Aspose.Words?
   A: Use the Font.Bold and Font.Italic properties on a Run or Paragraph. When the document is saved as Markdown, these properties are converted to **bold** or *italic* syntax automatically.

2. Q: Which style names are used for Markdown headings?
   A: Headings are represented by the built‑in heading styles Heading 1 through Heading 6. Setting a paragraph’s StyleIdentifier to one of these styles will produce the corresponding # to ###### Markdown heading when saved.

3. Q: How can I control the appearance of tables when exporting to Markdown?
   A: Set the TableContentAlignment property of MarkdownSaveOptions to Left, Center, or Right. This aligns the text inside each table cell in the generated Markdown table.

4. Q: What option should I use to include images in the saved Markdown file?
   A: Use MarkdownSaveOptions.ImagesFolder to specify a folder where images will be written, and set ImagesFolderAlias if you need a different relative path. The generated Markdown will contain image links pointing to that folder.

5. Q: How do I read an existing Markdown file into an Aspose.Words Document?
   A: Load the file with Document doc = new Document("input.md");. Aspose.Words parses the Markdown according to the CommonMark specification and creates the corresponding DOM, which you can then manipulate programmatically.