Getting Down With Markdown
Recently I've been looking for an alternative to docbook , which I've used for most of my tutorial handouts and internal developer documentation at Thinkcube . But the more I used it docbook the more I wanted a simpler solution which didn't require me to make sure my XML was in order.
Naturally, at first I thought I'd try Latex since it had a pretty good wrap with geeks and has even surpassed usability expectations set forth by some of the mainstream wordprecessors :). What I loved about Latex was you could concentrate on the content first and formatting later. Its legendary ability to output desktop publishing quality documents and convert to a variety of formats such as html, pdf or odt was a killer.
Just as I was about to dive into Latex, Chanux suggested Markdown as an alternative. Hmm, Markdown, I pondered... I even liked the sound of it. It turns out Markdown is even better! You could think of it as a simplified wiki syntax but a better description would...