Write and style text rapidly
Markdown makes it easy to write things for the web – and elsewhere!
REQUIRES
A text editor or a Markdownfriendly app
you will learn
How Markdown speeds up all kinds of writing
IT WILL TAKE
15 minutes
If you’ve ever looked at, written, or edited HTML, you’ll know that while it’s fairly straightforward it can also get horribly messy-looking, even when you’ve created a style sheet to separate out the formatting for its content. For example, for a numbered list you’d have something like this: <p>Best Macs ever</p> <ol> <li>MacBook Pro with Retina display</li> <li>New MacBook</li> <li>Power Macintosh</li> <ol> Wouldn’t it be better if you could just type this: Best Macs Ever 1. MacBook Pro with Retina display 2. New MacBook 3. Power Macintosh for the same results? That’s what Markdown is for. It’s designed to make writing for the web as easy as possible, so instead of HTML tags you use simpler methods to indicate what’s what. You can then run your finished document through a Markdown processor to turn it into proper HTML. Easy! Apps such as Ulysses can automatically color your Markdown text for easy identification and navigation. You don’t need a special app to write Markdown, but some apps offer useful features to help you.
There are many benefits to Markdown. The most obvious is time, because it enables you to fly through your documents adding formatting tags as you go. You don’t need special software to do it, either, because you can write Markdown in any text editor – even TextEdit – so the system requirements to use it are light and file sizes are tiny.
Still, it’s worth investing in a specific Markdown-friendly app such as Byword or Ulysses if you do a lot of writing. Such apps add even more useful features, including autocomplete, automatic formatting, familiar keyboard shortcuts, and (most usefully of all) publishing.
Markdown publishing enables you to export your work to whatever format suits without having to worry about changing any of your document’s content. So, in Ulysses you can send your document in plain text, rich text, Markdown, TextBundle, HTML, ePub, PDF, or DOCX format, and automatically publish to Medium or WordPress. The app’s built-in Markdown processor handles conversion, so your headings are wrapped in <h1> tags in HTML and assigned Heading 1 styles if you export as a Word document.
Markdown might not make you a better writer, but it’ll make you a much more productive one.