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Re:Markdown is an excellent choice for documentation by ksaj on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @04:05PM (#22678417)
I already do all my work in markdown. I got into the habit because of github, and haven't turned back since. The "killer feature" was that my documents work absolutely everywhere, and can easily be converted to a Word, PDF or HTML document on a whim. Leave the format "prettiness" to style sheets where it belongs. The side effect is that it clobbers the multiple-styles problem many corporate documents amass after more than a few people have edited them. The number of documents I've worked with that had UK, Canadian and US English all embedded in a paragraph-by-paragraph manner over the years...

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.

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.