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What is Markdown, and why should you use it? (4 reasons)

To produce and export Markdown format documents to PDF or HTML file formats, using a Markdown document writing tool. Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing for the internet easier. The philosophy behind Markdown is that plain text documents should be readable without tags mussing everything up, but there should still be ways to add text modifiers like lists, bold, italics, etc. It is an alternative to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, which use rich text that later gets converted to proper HTML. It’s possible you’ve encountered Markdown without realizing it. Facebook chat, Skype, and Reddit all let you use different flavors of Markdown to format your messages.

Here’s a quick example: to make words bold using Markdown, you simply enclose them in * (asterisks). So, *bold word* would look like bold word when everything is said and done.

All told, Markdown is a great way to write for the web using plain text.

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Markdown converts to HTML flawlessly, sparing you the hassle of opening and closing all those tags. So. Many. Tags. In fact, Markdown has the software to convert the plain text to HTML built in! So Markdown is actually a text-to-HTML conversion software in addition to being a markdown language.

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Large files and big data are one of many inevitabilities that comes with today’s computing. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering a file so freakishly large that your poor text editor crashes when trying to open it, we feel your pain. We’ve been there. If you’ve read those Stack Overflow threads we posted above, you’ll know that people inevitably answer the question with examples of text editors that do open those large files. Well, large files up to some threshold.