Use Markdown For Easy Web Writing

In listening to a bunch of Mac-centric podcasts lately, especially on workflows with the Mac, I have come across a tool that has been around for a while but is still not extremely popular with everyone. The tool is called Markdown and was created by John Gruber (Daring Fireball fame). The best way to explain it is the first paragraph from Markdown’s description on Mr. Gruber’s page:

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Yeah that is it in a nutshell. Before I jump in how to use this awesome tool on Mac and Windows, you may be wondering what the point of a tool like this actually is.

At first I didn’t get the reason for using Markdown. Cool, you can transfer plain text stuff into HTML, but who the hell uses HTML anymore? Well, if you are a web writer you use HTML every single day whether you know it or not and if you have used WordPress or any other CMS for any length of time you have most likely had to tweak some HTML.

If you are using WordPress there is nothing more agrevating than the WYSIWYG editor becoming too helpful with HTML tags in the background essentially destorying your formatting. Markdown can help you by transforming your text file into valid HTML. This allows you to paste your HTML into the HTML editor thus keeping your hard-won formatting. So nice.

Also, there is something to say for document portability. HTML is an agnostic type of document markup and can be rendered in pretty much any crappy web browser. With the continued use of many different operating systems and devices out in the wild (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) the need for a standard format for text is highly needed. Markdown helps this along by allowing you to standardized all your note formatting without locking you in to some proprietary format. Just HTML and txt files.

Markdown is pretty darn easy to use and if you have any experience messing aroudn with software and HTML it will be a snap. Markdown is written in Perl, so if you don’t have Perl on your Windows machine you can download and install Strawberry Perl from here. If you are a Mac user, Perl is already installed for you.

Next, go over to Daring Fireball and grab the Markdown.pl script, unzip it and put the Markdown.pl file in the directory that you will use to create and tranform your input text files.

Now the fun part; learning how to use the syntax and creating your input text file.

I am going to briefly explain some of the most used syntax snippets that will get you off an running with Markdown. If you want the whole shebang, head on over to Daring Fireball to get a detailed list of all the niceties of the Markdown syntax.

Headers tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) are simple to create in your text document. To signify the h1 tag, “underline” the text with the ‘=’ sign:

This is a h1 header===================

or for h2 use the ‘-’ character:

This is a h2 header-------------------

You don’t need to put the same amount of ‘=’ or ‘-’ characters under the heading; any number will due to produce the header tags.

I think in bullets and lists so it’s nice that Markdown handles them well. To insert a bullet append an asterisk to your line like this:

* This is my point

You can also use the ‘+’ or ‘-’ characters as bullets.

Ordered lists are easy too:

1. Number one2. Number two3. Number three... now you got it!

If you want multiple paragraphs under a bullet or number just indent the first line of each paragraph or indent all the lines if you want it to look nicer:

1. Here is the first point that I am trying to make about numbered lists. By the way, I should probably mention this too.2. Next point

One of my favorite things of Markdown is the easy way to insert links. First, bracket the word or phrase that you would like to be “clickable” and then follow that by a parenthesized URL:

[click here](http://www.google.com/)

After you have created your text file it is now time to pass it to the Markdown.pl script to produce your HTML output. If you didn’t create a text file to test, you can download the quick text file that I created to try it out.

Place your text file in the same directory as the Markdown.pl script (you can pass the arguments with the correct path if you want to, this is just to make it easier). After that is done open up your command prompt in Windows or your terminal on your Mac or Linux and navigate to the folder with your input file.

To create the output directly in the terminal window use the following command:

perl Markdown.pl input.txt

This will then parse the text file and output the valid HTML markup to the terminal. If you want the ouput to be directed towards a totally seperate HTML file type the following command:

perl Markdown.pl input.txt > output.html

This will create the HTML file output.html in whatever directory you are currently in.

Let me just say that if you think Markdown is interesting and understand the utility of it, I highly suggest that if you write anything you should write it with Markdow

n syntax. It is cross-platform, open source, free, and compatible with everything. To me it is a game changer and I feel like I am a little behind in not utilizing it sooner. Once again, there is much more to the syntax than I have highlighted here, so check out Daring Fireball for more.

By the way, I wrote this entire article using Markdown and if you want to see the syntax you can download it here.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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