Say yes to Markdown, no to MS Word

What on earth are you talking about? What’s wrong with our beloved and old companion Microsoft Word?

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a syntax language aiming for easy reading and writing of structured text. There are multiple implementations of the language (such as Github flavored Markdown) and each of these implementations have some own improvements and features that are not necessarily compatible with each other. Still each implementation bases on the same default syntax and when done right Markdown files are cross-compatible between different implementations.

Markdown is easy to learn and it only requires text editor to create your first document. The original Markdown syntax supports the following features:

• Paragraphs and line breaks
• Headers
• Blockquotes
• Lists
• Code blocks
• Horizontal rules
• Links
• Emphasis
• Images

By using just these features you can write out almost any document you could with Word. Markdown also supports inline HTML that can be used to create content that the syntax doesn’t support.