How do I format my posts and enter tables, code and groovy typeset mathematics?

The title just about says it all. Discourse allows us to do some pretty cool stuff. You can format your posts into sections and generally make it look quite nice with tables, computer code, and groovy typeset mathematics. How can we do that?

Generally, input in Discourse uses markdown, which is a plain, markup language. You type in input in a particular format and a processor reformats it into a particular output. To get the hyperlink above, for example, I typed in

[markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown)

Discourse uses particular dialect called common mark. That page has a pointer to a cheatsheet and a tutorial.

Tables

Let’s focus on tables first, since they are quite useful in statistics and you’ll need to use a table for your first Discourse assignment.

In that assignment, you are asked to create something like the following:

You can do this by typing

| Sex | Age |  Height  |
| --- | --- | -------- |
| M/F |  n  | ft' in'' |

Note that we simply use pipes | to create columns and dashes — to create rows. Colons can be use to align tables:

| Tables        | Are           | Cool  |
| ------------- |:-------------:| -----:|
| col 3 is      | right-aligned | $1600 |
| col 2 is      | centered      |   $12 |

There must be at least 3 dashes separating each header cell.
The outer pipes (|) are optional, and you don’t need to make the
raw Markdown line up prettily. You can also use inline Markdown.