<p><h1>About markdown</h1>
</p>
<p>Markdown is great as it is ubiquitous, and there are dozen of parsers for it. What I prefer about it is its readability even without conversion. I read it as source rather than html.</p>
<h2>Folks behinnd it</h2>
<ul>
<li>Aaron Swartz. RIP</li>
<li>John Gruber</li>
</ul>
<h2>Pandoc</h2>
<p>I think that it is possible to make a large project fully in markdown thank to <strong>pandoc</strong>, as there are many, many extensions for it. If I remember correctly, pandoc ususe its own markdown format internally to convert any document, so it may writing pandoc markdown may permit to do whatever pandoc can, which is quite everything.</p>
<h2>Many outputs</h2>
<p>For basic figures, plain text files may be enough, as you may see in gopher://z3bra.org.</p>
<p>Pandoc. It can then be used as a base to write quite everything, as it is very easy to write.</p>
<h2>Pretty as plain text too</h2>
<p>Tool for viewing markdown in terminal, by converting it to man pages or such:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/tj/mad">mad</a> (bash and perl based) and the newer <a href="http://tldr-pages.github.io/">tldr</a> that break the fronters between markdown and man pages.</li>
<li><a href="https://rtomayko.github.io/ronn/ronn.1.html">ronn</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/visit1985/mdp">mdp</a> to use markdown-like syntax to make presentations in the terminal.</li>
<li><code>less</code>. Seryously not a problem. It has a search function. Even in tty it is pleasant to read markdown with <a href="https://github.com/talamus/solarize-12x29-psf">this font</a> and with a <a href="https://github.com/sshbio/dot/blob/d5b6ecb0a8d75a54815548288bb86dfd078194bc/.profile#L109">tty theme</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="http://pub.iotek.org/p/MhEoX8y.png" alt="less + tty + nothing, just... nothing more. properly configured, that's it" /></p>
<p>See? Even without a root access, with a single print call and a .psf font, you will be able to review any markdown document in a way that looks quite good.</p>
<p>And markdown cuses both setext and atx heading permining you this setup (<a href="">and not set up am I right</a>):</p>
<ul>
<li>Document titles double underlined</li>
<li>H2 (first actual heading) being underlined, with any length.</li>
<li>Others with multiple <code>#</code> before.</li>
</ul>
<p>This looks just like any wikipedia default style!</p>
<h2>Sane format</h2>
<p>Have you ever opened a .docx archive and discovered the file with the content? The last time I checked, it was a single line of <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags">XML</a>. I do not want to check one more time.</p>
<p>Markdown syntax depend on the converter you use, and there are many implementation. But the <a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">original guide</a> outlines how simple the syntax and how laziness (or writing on a hurry) is not a problem to write valid markdown format. <a href="http://commonmark.org/">CommonMark</a> is an initiative to provide a real stardard.</p>
<p>There are also tools like <a href="https://github.com/mrcoles/readmd">readmd</a> to pretty-format valid but ugly markdown files. I prefer writing valid markdown from the beggining.</p>
<h2>Light setup</h2>
<p>There are many programs on GitHub that convert markdown to html that are no longer that 1000 lines of code.</p>
<ul>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/tfritzon/awkdown">awk</a>;</li>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/masak/markdown">perl</a>;</li>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/Gottox/smu">C</a>, the one I use;</li>
<li>In <a href="https://github.com/tfritzon/awkdown">many</a> <a href="">languages</a> <a href="https://github.com/vmg/redcarpet">libraries</a></li>
<li>Insert many others here!</li>
</ul>

<p>PS: I wrote this in markdown and converted it with smu</p>