# Reading Gemtext Note: this document it is deliberately not valid gemtext, it is text/plain rather than text/gemini. It is designed to help you to learn to read gemtext without the aid of specialized software. There are several good guides to help people write in the gemtext format. Here is a brief guide to reading gemtext documents. The programs that display nicely-formatted gemtext documents work by reading only the first two or three characters at the beginning of each line of text. In this document I will insert a blank space at the beginning of lines that demonstrate gemtext markup as a way to show you what the markup looks like (in case you happen to read this file in a gemtext browser). Gemtext is written as one long line of text for each paragraph. Programs that are designed to display gemtext automatically force any text that is too long to fit in your window onto the next line. If you're reading gemtext in a text editor you can achieve the same effect in many editors by enabling their "word wrap" or "soft wrap" features. From this point forward this document will use long lines. ## Headings A line that begins with one or more "#" characters introduces a new section of the document. More "#" characters indicate lesser levels of importance, or greater levels of detail, within the document. ### Heading Types Gemtext provides three types of headings. These are similar to what you might see in HTML code as

,

, and

level headings. # Level 1 Heading -- many documents have only one Level 1 heading, at the very top of the document, that serves as a title. ## Level 2 Heading -- these are often used to indicate the various major sections of the document. ### Level 3 Heading -- indicates a subsection of a larger portion the document. ## Lists Lines that begin with the "*" character are list items. Gemtext supports only one type of bulleted list. It is what HTML designates as