- Markdown language how to#
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Some people were very excited about Markdown, while others – not so much. Interestingly, it experienced a surge in popularity among technical writers around 2016. Benefits of Markdown for Technical WritingĪs a result of its simplicity, Markdown quickly became very popular among web writers. Technical Writer Tony Ibbs delivered a very interesting talk at Write the Docs Prague 2018 about the history of markup languages.Īs you can see from Tony’s slide, Markdown is still a bit of a newcomer on the markup language scene. It had to be so simple that just anyone could use it – without years of training. Since most markup languages were originally designed for very complex technical projects, there grew a need for a “lightweight” markup language. Markdown has evolved as a way to simplify markup for web users. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and probably the best-known markup language used on the web today.
This means that the tags for formatting directly applied within the plain text file, as opposed to being specified in a separate file like CSS for example. “HTML a an example of a widely known and used markup language.”
Markdown language code#
The code used to specify the formatting called as tags. The language specifies code for formatting, both the layout and style, within a text file. “The processing, definition and presentation of text. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is both human and machine-readable.Īccording to Webopedia, a markup language is defined as a tool used for: Markdown is used to render plain text in the browser but other markup languages may communicate directly with the computer. The name “Markdown” is in fact a play on words of the term “markup”. Markdown is just one kind of markup language, of which there are many. Check out this in-depth guide to Markdown from Ghost. This is an excellent cheat sheet for getting started with Markdown. It presents a vast improvement over no formatting and is relatively easy to do.
Just try using a bit of Markdown in Trello to format some of your cards. If a product supports Markdown, the company will tell you somewhere on their features page or their homepage. Many editors support Markdown, like Document360 which is our knowledge base platform. You save your files in the Markdown format if you’re working in a plain text editor, or ensure your editor has a parser for Markdown. You write your text in the normal way, but format it using Markdown syntax – which can be found online. The key way you work with Markdown is in a file with an extension that is either.
Markdown language how to#
How to use Markdown for Technical Writing? Markdown is fairly notable in that it combines both presentational and semantic syntax. Semantic syntax tells you what the text actually is, so that could be a list or a reference. So for example, presentational syntax tells you how to present the text, as in the case of making it bold or underlined. The Markdown syntax is the information that your tool holds about the text. You certainly don’t need to know some other programming language such as JavaScript or Ruby.įor our purposes, Markdown is “plain text formatting syntax” – but it’s also a tool (parser) that converts this plain text formatting into HTML to display on the web. The first thing you really need to know about Markdown is that it’s a way of formatting text content in an editor – without requiring you to know or use coding languages like HTML or CSS. It’s licensed under a BSD-style open source license.
Markdown language free#
Markdown is open source free software, which means that anyone can use it. Gruber’s definition shows that Markdown intended for anyone producing content on the web – which nowadays pretty much for anyone. 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).” “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. John Gruber is the original creator of Markdown, and he defines it as:
Markdown language download#
Download the eBook of this article to understand “The Ins and Outs of Using Markdown for Technical Writing” in offline! Definition of Markdown
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