A 90-Second Guide to 15-418/618 Markdown

When adding articles, comments, etc. to the site, your text input will be processed by an extended version of markdown to produce pleasing (as least we think so) visual output that includes links, basic formatting, and images. Markdown is designed to be very easy to read in plain-text and it's syntax is very well documented on the web. If you don't have much experience writing in Markdown, this site allows you to play around. Further information about Markdown syntax can be found here. We've also extended Markdown in two ways that are specific to this site. Please see below for details.

Inline math

We've extended markdown with MathJax to allow support for inline math. As things can get complicated when you mix the two, we recommend the following when you need to write math:

To have inline tex, do:

$ \sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6} $ 

which will display like: $\sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6} $. For paragraph math, do:

$$
  \sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6}
$$

Which will look like: $$ \sum_{n=1}^\infty {1\over n^2} = {\pi^2\over 6} $$

To do a literal \$, do \$

Internal site links

Rather than use full web urls for content on the 15-418 web site, we offer convenient shortcuts to help you refer to pages on the 15-418 site. (It's very much like the special syntax for internal links on a wiki.) We highly encourage you to use this short format when linking to content on the site, because if the site's URLs ever change (and they almost certainly will) your links will remain valid. Here are some examples of using the 15-418-specific short syntax in the url part of regular Markdown links. (The url part of a Markdown link definition is the part inside the parenthesis. The text inside the brackets is just how the link will be displayed during HTML rendering. For more on Markdown links, visit the references given at the top of this page.)

To generate a link to lecture 1, use:

[lecture 1](cmulecture:whyparallelism)

If you want to know the short name of a lecture (e.g., basicarch above), just go visit the lecture on the site. You'll be able to read the short name of a lecture right out of it's url. For example, lecture 1's url is lecture/whyparallelism.

To generate a link to lecture 1, slide 1, use:

[lecture 1, slide 1](cmulecture:whyparallelism[slide_001])

As with links to lectures, if you want to know the name of a slide, just take a look at the slide's url. All lecture slide urls on the site are of the form lecture/lecturename/slidename.

To generate a link to the [lecture 1 video](No video for lecture whyparallelism) use:

[lecture 1 video](cmulecturevideo:whyparallelism)

Note the above link may not work until the first class letures is posted. You can even generate a link to specific offset (in seconds) in the video ([this link](No video for lecture whyparallelism) is 60 seconds in):

[this link](cmulecturevideo:whyparallelism[60])

Currently, articles don't have short names, only numerical ids. To generate a link to article 1, use:

[article 1](cmuarticle:1)

Figures with Captions

If you add the optional title tag to an embedded image, it will get converted into a figure with a caption. This can be done as follows:

![Image alt text](url_of_image "Image caption")