[DG: Open Forum] Favorite Markup Language

[Ray Davis]

I stick to very vanilla HTML (with CSS as needed) as much as possible, 
but then my main publishing venue has been the web for a *long* time now 
-- my steadiest writing gigs in the '90s were online magazines, and I 
began blogging in summer of '99. But yeah, it's a pain when I have to 
move big chunks of text to and from RTF or PDF -- every automated helper 
I know injects way too much "intelligence".

My favorite of the alternatives is Textile, mostly because it's the 
least verbose for basic formatting. If the idea is to speed up my 
typing, then I really do want it to be fast. It helps that there's a lot 
of overlap with Confluence markup.

Best,
Ray

On 4/26/10 10:42 AM, Steven Githens wrote:
> Sometimes I don't mind writing HTML for simple docs ( I used to use
> docbook, and that was way more painful ).  But I suppose HTML can mean a
> lot of things.  If you were going to roll a set of documentation with
> just HTML what stack of tools would you use?  I think the usage of even
> more than a couple HTML editors would mangle the documents with their
> own conventions.
>
> Usually, if you use Markdown or Restructured Text, in addition to the
> syntax it brings along the toolchain ( for example using Sphinx with
> Restructured Text ).  So I guess, it's a core markup plus a set of nice
> tools to make tables of contents and stuff too, although for this use
> case I was imagining a text editor being the authoring tool across the
> examples.
>
> -s
>
>
> Nate Angell wrote:
>> I like this markup syntax called "HTML"...it's pretty widely used and
>> there are some tools out there to help you use it.
>>
>> --
>> Nate Angell
>> Client Evangelist
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Steven Githens<swgithen at mtu.edu>  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Just curious what you're favorite markup/wiki/formatting syntax is.
>>> Markdown? Creole? Restructured Text? LaTeX?  Something else?  The
>>> context here is mostly for writing instructions and technical
>>> documentation for open source software.
>>>
>>> I've been using Restructured Text for my personal projects, and am
>>> thinking about switching to Markdown or something similar.
>>>
>>> DISCUSS!
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Steve