Markdown was originally designed for HTML authoring, and permits raw HTML anywhere, anytime. I'll show you the best solutions first, and the undesirable ones last. I won't show you how to add alignment, floating, or padding - but my sizing example will suffice, because once you know how to change an image's size, you'll know how to do other things too. To motivate this discussion, I'll use the example of a large image that should be displayed as a smaller size. The rest of this post is dedicated to various solutions to these shortcomings. Standard Markdown doesn't offer anything beyond this, but it's very common for websites to need width, height, and CSS class attributes as well. That is, Markdown allows you to specify an tag with src, alt, and title attributes in HTML. Here's how you insert an image in Markdown: !(/src/of/image.jpg 'title')
This post presents a variety of ways to format images with Markdown, from brute force to proprietary syntax extensions, unwise hacks, and everything in between. Markdown is a convenient HTML-focused shorthand syntax for formatting content such as documentation and blog articles, but it lacks basic features for image formatting, such as alignment and sizing.
