How to write on Medium?

The composition UI of Medium looks too simple:

At the beginning, there are two places you can type: “Title” and “Tell your story…”. The title is just what you imagine – the title of your article, and what you type in the area of “Tell your story…” forms the body of your article. After you type some content and select some text of what you type, an editing toolbar appears:

It seems you can only use the buttons on the toolbar to make selected text bold/italic/quoted/a large title/a small title, or add a link/private annotation to it.  But,

How can I add a head?

The text you input in the “Title” area automatically become an H1 head – it is called title.

The text you input at the second line will become an H2 head if you select them and click the bigger T button on the toolbar, and it is called subtitle.

Apart from the title and subtitle, you can also click the bigger T button on the toolbar to a selected line to make it an H1 head, and click the smaller T button on the toolbar to a selected line to make it an H2 head.

I don’t know how to make other types of headers such as an H3 head or an H4 head on medium.

How can I add an image?

You can just press Ctrl+V to paste an image from the clipboard onto your post, or you can start a new line and click the rounded + button to add a picture, even a video:

It will open a browser window for you to select an image file on your computer to be uploaded and put on your post.

How to add alter text and caption to an image?

With the image uploaded, you can see a new toolbar appears above the image:

 

You can click the “Alt text” button on the toolbar to add alter text for the image. You input the caption for the image directly below the image.

How to add a link to an image?

At first glance, there seems no option for you to add a link to an image. But you can click the image, press the key Ctrl+K, then you can see a black input box appears above the image where you can type/paste a link url.

How to add a list on Medium?

Again, there seems no option on the editing toolbar for you to insert a list (ordered or unordered) to your article. To add an unordered list or an ordered list, you need some tricks.

How to add an unordered list?

1. start a new line
2. type -(dash) and a space, then type other characters of an item, you will see the the dash and space are replaced by a dot and the line becomes an item of an unordered list.
3. press enter to start a new line, and the line automatically becomes the next item of the unordered list(beginning with a dot). No need to input a dash and a space at the beginning of the line. If you don’t want a new item of the list, but just a new line for the previous item, press shift+enter instead of enter.
4. In the same way, you can continuously input the remaining items of the unordered list.
5. simply press an enter on a new line to finish the unordered list.

 

How to add an ordered list?

use the same procedure as adding an unordered list, but instead of typing a dash and a space, you type 1 and .(period) at the beginning of the first item. The following items are automatically numbered.

How to change the color of text or font size on Medium?

Unfortunately, it seems you cannot change the color/font size of selected text on Medium.