Preface template in Markdown: reasons for a set of pieces

Purpose of this preface

With this preface template, you write one finished prose passage on a single .md page. You explain why you wrote an invented set of short pieces and what you describe in those pieces. You keep the preface itself in ordinary paragraphs under a title, with a brief description between the title and the Preface heading.

You write about the reason for the set as a whole, rather than describing a particular doorway. You keep the subject in general words, as in the doorway sample here. You can write this passage in a text editor.

You read about formatting marks alongside plain text through the .md introduction.

Template paragraph anatomy

You copy the preface template from this post into your .md file. You replace the instruction sentences with your finished wording, keeping the title, description, and prose in the arrangement shown.

# Write a title for the invented preface

Write a sentence saying that this preface and the set of pieces are invented.

## Preface

Write a paragraph explaining why you wrote these pieces and chose their subject.

Write a paragraph describing the subject of these pieces in general words.

You write the title after the # mark, naming the preface without beginning the passage there.

You put the invented description on its own line beneath the title, apart from the prose under Preface.

You keep one ## heading, Preface, in this template; you exclude the # title from that heading count. You replace two placeholder paragraphs under Preface, writing the reason for your pieces first and their general subject second.

You can examine single line breaks beside paragraph gaps in paragraph spacing in Markdown; for the preface template here, you separate the prose paragraphs using a blank line.

Jane Doe's doorway example

Jane Doe wrote the passage here for this post's sample; Jane Doe, her pieces, and the entire passage are invented.

# Preface to pieces about doorways

An invented preface by Jane Doe for an invented set of short prose pieces about ordinary doorways.

## Preface

I chose ordinary doorways because I wanted to write about the boundary between entering and remaining outside. I wrote these pieces to give that small subject my full attention.

In these pieces, I describe doorways as passages between spaces. I stay with their everyday purpose and the act of crossing a threshold.

Jane Doe writes her reason for choosing doorways in the opening paragraph of this sample. Jane Doe describes her pieces' general subject in the second paragraph, keeping the finished preface to two short paragraphs.

Name for the preface

You could name the sample file doorway-preface.md, joining the subject to the kind of passage. You keep the title, description, and finished preface together in that file. You can examine word separators and filename endings in the Markdown naming guide.

Where Sashmark fits

Planned as a Markdown viewer and editor for desktop machines, Sashmark has a target group: people who hold .md pages made by AI agents. Right now it is being built and is not out. A directory of those .md pages is one type of file set intended for Sashmark.

See the planned features, the help pages and the roadmap for where each part stands.

sashmark.com.