Formatting text with markdown

Most boxes where you write more than a line accept markdown: a small set of plain-text marks that turn into formatting when the page renders. You type **sold out**, readers see sold out.

Every one of those boxes has a Preview button. Use it — it renders exactly what your readers will see.

Where it works

Your event description
Event updates
Agenda sessions and speaker bios
How to get there — parking, transit, and doorbell notes
Payment instructions, when you collect money off Cloomba
The description under a guest question
Calendar newsletters

Titles, names, and comments are plain text — markdown marks typed there show up as the characters you typed.

The basics

**bold**   *italic*   ~~struck out~~

- a bullet
- another bullet

1. first
2. second

> a quoted line

Three dashes on a line of their own draw a divider across the page.

Headings

Start your headings at ##. A single # is reserved — Cloomba uses it to mark language sections in event descriptions.

## Schedule

### Morning

That still leaves five levels, more than any event page needs. On an event page every heading level renders at close to the same size anyway: headings are there to give your text structure and something to scan, not big type.

Line breaks

This is the one place Cloomba differs from markdown elsewhere: a single line break is a real line break. Type a schedule one line at a time and it stays that way.

18:00 — doors
18:30 — first talk
19:15 — break

Leave a blank line between blocks to start a new paragraph.

Links

[our venue](https://example.com/venue)

Links to other sites open in a new tab, so someone half-way through filling in your registration form does not lose their answers. A web address typed on its own becomes a link automatically.

Tables

Good for schedules, line-ups, and price tiers.

| Time  | Session         | Speaker |
| ----- | --------------- | ------- |
| 18:30 | Indexing basics | Jana    |
| 19:15 | Query plans     | Marek   |

Keep the number of columns small — the same table has to fit on a phone.

Images

![](https://example.com/poster.jpg)

In your event description there is a shortcut: paste an image from the clipboard, or drag a file into the box, and it uploads and inserts itself. Images sit on their own line and fill the width of the text column.

What does not work

HTML. Tags, <iframe> embeds, and scripts are ignored rather than shown. That includes embedded video players — link to the video instead.
Footnotes and mathematical notation.

If it looks wrong

Open Preview. Almost every surprise is one of three things: a heading with no space after the ##, an emphasis mark opened and never closed, or HTML pasted in from another site and dropped.