+++
has_sessions = ["firstsession.md"]
title = "Migration"
+++
# Introduction to Sandpoints

This is experimental publishing platform **Sandpoints**.

# Sandpoints' structure

As already demonstrated Sandpoints is developed and accessible as a web site. On top of that, Sandpoints, at any given moment, allows for printing all of its content into a well designed PDF publication. The PDF publication prints out _Table of Contents_ with precise pagination numbers for every section and subsection.

That's one of the reasons why Sandpoints introduces triadic tiers structure for its content. The header of this page, once rendered against Sandpoints theme, says:

**ship/Sandpoints**

> This is not a ship.

Remember?

## Triadic tiers: [ship::deck::cabin]

This is not a ship. Ship has decks. Decks has cabins. This is a poetic way to introduce one of the ways to develop Sandpoints. You launch **Sandpoints ship**. Your ship has decks. Decks has cabins. The _Table of Contents_ in Sandpoints' **PDF** will always know what's the page number of any of your decks or cabins.

# Markdown

Sandpoints accepts [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown). A plain text formatting syntax created by Aaron Swartz and John Gruber in 2004. It was designed with an idea that formatting could stay plain text, human readable, but with enough of intented instructions and structure from the author that any post-processing tools of interpratation can make it look good.

Let me quote the authors:

> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

And **emphasize**, pun intended, that simple rules allow for making text _italic_ or lists with its points:

- surrounding a word with two asterisks makes the word **emphasized**
- surrounding a word with to underscores makes the word _italic_
- blockquote shoudl start with a character ">" (check out the quote by the authors few lines above)
- starting the line with a character "-", just like this line as a fourth in a row, will make the line a bullet points

As one can see it already looks well structured but after I submit it in a second this text will get a look and feel of a Sandpoints default theme. Let's see!


[^me]: It doesn't matter who's **me** in this context. But it was a nice opportunity to show the syntax for footnotes. This is a footnote.

