Participatory texts relay on the parsing of Markdown texts to produce a structured document.

Participatory texts are divided into 3 types of blocks:

- Section: produced by main headers (paragraphs starting with "# ")
- Subsection: produced by secondary headers (paragraphs starting more than one "#") until 6 levels.
- Article: produced by paragraphs and lists.

Parsing of Markdown is strict.
This means that, for paragraphs and lists, all blocks should be separated by a blank line between them.
The first, second and this third paragraphs, for example, will be grouped into a single participatory text article.

This paragraph instead, will produce a single participatory text article.

This paragraph also, will produce a third participatory text article.

Inside a paragraph list or a list, bold text is supported, italics text is supported, underlined text is supported.
As explained here Markdown treats asterisks (*) and underscores (_) as indicators of emphasis. Text wrapped with these characters will be wrapped with an HTML tag; double *’s or _’s will be wrapped with an HTML tag. E.g., this input:

- single asterisks
- single underscores
- double asterisks
- double underscores

You can use the following reference when writing your documents: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet.

Lists will be parsed as one block:

- consensus by simple majority: when a, b, and c appear in the creation.
- consensus by enhanced majority: when a, b, c and also d appear in the creation.
- consensus by absolute majority: when x, y and z appear in the creation.
- consensus by imposing whatever the organization wants: to be used at will.
- consensus by ignoring whatever resulted from the previous consensus: to be used when organization don't like the results of another consensus system.

Ordered lists will be parsed too:

1. one
2. two
3. three
4. four
5. five

A link to Decidim's web site uses this format.