Introduction to Markdown
by Scott Granneman & Bill Odom
SLUUG St. Louis Unix Users Group
http://www.sluug.org/
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 - 6:30pm
Graybar Electric Co, Inc.
11885 Lackland Road, Maryland Heights, MO 63146
John Gruber, one of the inventors of Markdown, explains that Markdown began as a way to "write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)... The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions."
Markdown has grown far beyond its HTML-centric roots, however, and people now use it to generate documents in a huge variety of formats. Even so, the clean, simple syntax remains -- Markdown documents are still good ol' plain text, and are still as human-readable as ever.
This talk by Scott Granneman & Bill Odom will cover the basics of Markdown's syntax, key variants of Markdown, tools for composing Markdown (including Vim, of course!), and ways you can easily transform a plain text file written in Markdown into HTML, JSON, TXT, LaTeX, man, MediaWiki, Textile, DocBook XML, ODT, EPUB, Slidy and S5 HTML and JavaScript slide shows, RTF, or even Word!
