Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight Markup Language with plain-text formatting syntax. It was created in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz with the goal of enabling people to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid HTML. The project was first released on Daring Fireball, the blog of John Gruber.

Over the years, several variations of Markdown have emerged to address ambiguities in the original specification. CommonMark was developed to provide a highly compatible and standardized version of the language. Another popular variant is GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM), which is used extensively on the GitHub platform for README files and pull request comments. Many Static Site Generators, such as Jekyll and Hugo, rely on Markdown for content authoring.

For more technical details, the CommonMark Specification provides a formal definition of the syntax. Developers often use tools like Pandoc to convert Markdown into various document formats, including PDF and Microsoft Word according to the Pandoc Documentation.

• Markup Language
• Pandoc
• YAML
• Text Editors