# Markdown

mkbook relies pretty extensively on Markdown for its ease of use. If you’re not familiar with Markdown, it is a simple markup language that is design to be easy to read and write in plain text, and then (relatively) easy for a computer to convert into other formats such as HTML or LaTeX.

The above paragraph looks like this:

    _mkbook_ relies pretty extensively on
    [Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) for its ease of use.
    If you're not familiar with _Markdown_, it is a simple markup language that is
    design to be easy to read and write in plain text, and then (relatively) easy
    for a computer to convert into other formats such as HTML or LaTeX.

Markdown by itself isn’t quite enough for most purposes, so mkbook actually uses the CommonMark spec with some additional extensions to make life easier.

Next chapter: “CommonMark”