Add pages manually to your documentation by creating Markdown (.md) or MDX (.mdx) files. New to Markdown? See Markdown Guide: Getting started.
NOTE: Throughout our documentation, we refer to both Markdown and MDX as Markdown. MDX is a version of Markdown, extended to allow the use of JSX components.
Place your pages inside your fern/ folder and link to them from your navigation settings in the docs.yml file.
In the example below, the MDX files are inside a folder named pages/.
Fern automatically generates the <h1> page header for each page from docs.yml. For example, here’s the docs.yml entry that maps the page you are reading now:
The value for page is used as the content of the top <h1> element of this page. Thus, when adding content to your Markdown pages, begin with <h2> instead of <h1>.
Fern has a built-in component library you can use in Markdown. Explore the components.
When clicked, links to relative URLs open in the same tab, whereas links to absolute URLs open in a new browser tab.
Use a / character to begin a relative URL to another page on your docs site. This routes to the url defined in your docs.yml file, such as example-docs.buildwithfern.com. For example, if you want to link to https://example-docs.buildwithfern.com/overview/introduction, you can write the link in Markdown as follows:
You can use locally stored images or URLs to include images in your Markdown pages. Use either Markdown syntax or the <img> HTML tag to insert the image.
Common image attributes:
For more details about the HTML image element and its attributes, see the MDN documentation on the img element.
You can embed local assets in your Markdown pages using the <embed> component. This is useful for displaying PDFs, images, videos, OpenAPI files, and other assets into your docs.
For example, to embed a video, use the following Markdown:
You can embed videos in your documentation using the HTML <video> tag. This gives you control over video playback settings like autoplay, looping, and muting.
You can also wrap the video in a container div for additional styling:
Common video attributes:
For more details about the HTML video element and its attributes, see the MDN documentation on the video element.
You can embed videos from YouTube, Loom, Vimeo, and other streaming platforms using an <iframe> element.
See an example of Markdown used for embedding videos and how it renders on the corresponding docs page from the ElevenLabs documentation.
Fern supports LaTeX math equations. To use LaTeX, wrap your inline math equations in $. For example, $(x^2 + y^2 = z^2)$ will render .
For display math equations, wrap the equation in $$. For example:
Fern supports creating diagrams within your Markdown using Mermaid. Mermaid offers a variety of diagrams, including flowcharts, entity-relationship models, and Gantt charts. To include a Mermaid diagram in your Markdown file, create a codeblock marked with mermaid.