Markdown

Manfred Stienstra ‘s Python version of Markdown has been updated by Yuri Takhteyev:
http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/python-markdown

I’m attracted to Markdown because it is simple – borrowing from plain text email / Usenet text formatting conventions was smart – although I should really try to get my head around using reStructured Text one last time before coming to a conclusion.

Currently I use Textile most often—for one of my projects and businesses I write a fair amount of text every day via a simple through the web interface and Textile works nicely for me. I think the lack of a simple footnote capability would disturb me most about moving away from Textile; in my day-to-day work I don’t use much other than headers, blockquotes, and in-line links and images, although I do a lot of cutting and pasting and quoting of various texts from government and financial sources, so handling hard line breaks intelligently is a plus for Markdown which Textile does not manage properly out of the box (not a big issue to fix).

At the moment I’m rewriting that system, hopefully putting some components of it up live later today, and believe it or not I’m still not certain which text formatting system I want to use going forward—so naturally the content objects handle all of the above ;-)

Perhaps I’ll write using Markdown and reST each for a week and see which drives me mad the least! In the end I think Markdown may just win, simplicity in input format being the major factor, leading to easier reusability of the original text for purposes other than (X)HTML output.

Ironically this post is formatted using a Textile formatter.

Related: HTML back to Markdown: Aaron Swartz’s html2text.py