Re:Markdown is an excellent choice for documentation
by Amelorate on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @05:42PM
(#22679354)
It sounds like you were writing your documents in troff/groff.
Re:Markdown is an excellent choice for documentation
by ksaj on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @08:10PM
(#22680488)
I do think it was influenced by troff, since they do bear some visual similarities. A little googling didn't find what it was, but I do believe it was directly related to this: http://www.sngx2.com.br/Help/Epson%20ESC-P2%20Printer%20Comm...
Except that the escape was replaced by a dot for the driver that converted it, and more "user friendly" formats like title (which was centered, bold and underlined). But I'm literally guessing since it was so long ago.
Mind you, I started out in that frame of mind, since at the end of the 80's I used to write all my documents in a format that I no longer remember the name of. What I do remember is that it used dot codes, so something italicized would start with .i and .u for underlining. The purpose was to allow the dot matrix printers to over-strike, which provided much higher print resolution than the printer would normally be capable of. It had higher level codes for things like titles, etc, which is the connection I make to markdown.
Markdown languages allow you to get things looking reasonably good with extremely few attention-diverting things like format getting in the way of progress.