What is Markdown?
Markdown is a lightweight markup language based on the formatting conventions used in email. It has just enough syntax to provide for most of the formatting (bold and italic, links and headings) used on most webpages.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. –John Gruber (inventor of Markdown)
Markup formatting
Markdown, AsciiDoc, ReStructured Text, Org-Mode, HTML, XML and so on are all types of text markup that provide various conventions for formatting text.
Most importantly though, they allow different methods for introducing minimal, machine-readable structure into plain text documents.
Plain text markup formats
- Markdown
- AsciiDoc
- Org-Mode
- ReStructured Text
- HTML
- Hypertext Markup Language
- XML
- Extensible Markup Language
- etc.
Markup can be easily converted into…
- Polished documents (e.g., PDF, .docx, Epub)
- Websites (e.g., Jekyll)
- Documentation (e.g., Just the Docs)
- Presentations (e.g., Reveal.js, PPT)
Plain text data formats
Plain text formats are ideally suited to the storage of large amounts of data. Some examples of common plain text data storage formats are:
- Tab-Separated Values (TSV)
- Comma-Separated Values (CSV)
- JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
- YAML
Plain text data can be easily converted into:
- Spreadsheets (e.g., Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc)
- Databases (e.g., MySQL)
- Charts, graphs, analytics (e.g., using R, Python, or Ruby)
- Website APIs (which often read or output JSON)
The following formats may be of particular interest to scholars:
- BibTeX (Bibliographies and citation data)
- TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)
- CSL (Citation Style Language for citation formatting)