Stencila documents combine familiar authoring patterns such as Markdown, frontmatter, figures, tables, footnotes, and code blocks with richer document features for execution, review, and publishing.
You can work with documents in several formats, including Stencila Markdown, MyST, Quarto, and DOCX. This makes it possible to exchange documents with other tools and workflows while still using Stencila to edit, execute, review, and publish them.
However, Stencila Markdown is the only format that supports all of Stencila's document features. It is Stencila's native authoring format, and it is the format used throughout examples and demos in the documentation.
If you are learning how document syntax works in Stencila, Stencila Markdown is the best place to start.
Stencila can read and write multiple document formats, but they do not all support the same feature set.
In practice, this means you can often convert advanced Stencila documents to other formats, but some features may be simplified, approximated, or omitted when those formats do not have an equivalent representation.
If you need the full Stencila feature set, author in Stencila Markdown.
Most documents begin with the same core building blocks you would expect in Markdown:
Stencila Markdown extends those basics with syntax for richer document structures and workflows, including:
If you are new to authoring Stencila documents, these pages are the best place to start:
Once you are comfortable with the basics, you can explore Stencila's richer authoring features:
Stencila also supports authoring and preserving review information inside documents:
These features are especially useful when documents move between Stencila and collaborative formats such as DOCX or Google Docs.
