How to indent a few lines in Markdown markup?

This is an old thread, but I would have thought markdown's blockquotes ('> ') would be best for this:

One way to do it is to use bullet points, which allows you specify multiple levels of indentation. Bullet points are inserted using multiples of two spaces, star, another space Eg.:

this is a normal line of text
  * this is the first level of bullet points, made up of <space><space>*<space>
    * this is more indented, composed of <space><space><space><space>*<space>

This method has the great advantage that it also makes sense when you view the raw text.

If you care about not seeing the bullet points themselves, you should (depending on where you're using markdown) to be able to add li {list-style-type: none;} to the css for the whole mark down area.

There's no way to do that in markdown's native features. However markdown allows inline HTML, so writing

      This will appear with six space characters in front of it

will produce:

      This will appear with six space characters in front of it

If you have control over CSS on the page, you could also use a tag and style it, either inline or with CSS rules.

Either way, markdown is not meant as a tool for layout, it is meant to simplify the process of writing for the web, so if you find yourself stretching its feature set to do what you need, you might look at whether or not you're using the right tool here. Check out Gruber's docs:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

See if this ">" helps:

Line 1
> line 2 
>> line 3