Markdown Formatting Test

Date: September 10, 2025
Category: technical

Introduction to This Test Document

This document serves as a comprehensive test of all markdown formatting features. It includes an excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which is now in the public domain.

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to demonstrate:

  1. Paragraph rendering with justified text
  2. Typography including emphasis and strong text
  3. Lists both ordered and unordered
  4. Blockquotes for quotations
  5. Headings at various levels
  6. Links with proper touch targets

Chapter I - The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon.

Key Themes

The opening chapter establishes several important themes:

Character Development

Nick Carraway, our narrator, introduces himself with these characteristics:

  1. Thoughtful and introspective
  2. Non-judgmental (or so he claims)
  3. Well-educated and privileged
  4. Observant of human nature

Testing More Markdown Features

Emphasis Variations

Here we test italic text, bold text, and bold italic text. We can also use underscores for italics and double underscores for bold.

Nested Lists

  1. First major point
    • Sub-point A
    • Sub-point B
      • Even deeper point
  2. Second major point
    • Another sub-point
  3. Third major point

Multiple Blockquotes

As Fitzgerald writes in the novel:

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And later:

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Horizontal Rules

You can create horizontal rules like this:

Code and Technical Content

While this site doesn’t emphasize code, you can include inline code snippets if needed. The monospace font provides good contrast on e-ink displays.

Continuation of Chapter I

And so it happened that on a certain evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.

Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

Final Observations

This long-form text demonstrates how justified paragraphs appear on e-ink displays, how links are formatted with their grey backgrounds, and how various markdown elements render in a compact but readable layout optimized for minimal scrolling.

The test includes:

End of document

Source: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) - Public Domain