Telegram-Flavored Markdown

TFM is an extended Markdown format for representing Telegram messages, inspired by GitHub's and Notion's Markdown formats.

This repository contains TFM.md — format description (≈1000 tokens) to teach your LLM speak in TFM.

FAQ

Q: Telegram already has MarkdownV2, why not just use it?

We believe MarkdownV2 parse mode supported by Telegram Bot API is poorly suited for LLMs for several reasons:

1. Too Strict: MarkdownV2 requires escaping almost every special character (_, *, [, ], etc.) if it isn't part of a formatting entity. LLMs frequently fail to escape characters consistently, causing the Telegram API to reject messages with 400 Bad Request errors.

2. Non-Standard: MarkdownV2 differs from the common Markdown format that LLMs are overwhelmingly trained on:

   • Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, ~~strikethrough~~
   • MarkdownV2: *bold*, _italic_, ~strikethrough~

   This mismatch requires heavy system prompting and in LLMs not following the format correctly.

3. Bizarre Syntax: Advanced features like expandable block quotations use non-intuitive syntax (e.g., **>The expandable block...||) that combines empty bold entities and spoiler tags. LLMs struggle to replicate such syntax hacks consistently.