Overall, I’ve used kramdown Markdown + Jekyll, DITA + OxygenXML, and I buried my head in reStructuredText + Sphinx for a couple of days to evaluate it. All of these systems are solid choices, and inexpensive. With each approach, you can easily plug into version control frameworks like git, and you can work in text file formats. Apr 08, 2021 Markdown and reStructuredText use different and incompatible syntax for arbitrary text hyperlinks, but reStructuredText will generate hyperlinks for e-mail addresses or URLs, and Markdown will do so as well if they are enclosed in angle brackets. Some Markdown processors do not require the angle brackets, but there is little reason to omit.
Markdown was developed in 2004, initially in Perl. It is used by Tumblr, Stackoverflow, GitHub, and Reddit. Here is a sandbox. On Ubuntu you can install a script which converts Markdown to HTML with the following command. ReStructuredText vs Markdown for documentation In this post I am going to share my experience of using Markdown and reStructuredText (RST) for technical documentation. As a library developer I have to write a fair amount of it, for example, the fmt library documentation. Clean my ram.
I'm not a big fan of traditional text formatting because of all its problems, like having to preserve it during copy/paste, having to think about own save format, and so forth. This adds complexity and bugs, and you have to maintain it.
While not using formatting, I still need to organize my text for readability, so I use simple techniques like stars (*) for bullet lists, line breaks to separate paragraphs, something to highlight headings and so on. Now this is very close to using a lightweight markup language. What they are doing is define a 'standard' set of such simple techniques. Your raw text will always look fine, but you can additionally present it with rich styles by using extra renderer.
Sphinx Vs Markdown
Just check out how Github utilizes Markdown: raw text, rendered text. It even handles code sections. There's another language, reST or reStructuredText, popular in Python world.
Wikitext Vs Markdown
The idea is to have two modes: raw and rendered for both notes list and note editor. Editor in rendered mode could apply styles on-the-fly similar to how Confluence editor works.