What Is MultiMarkdown - nolboo/wiki-syntax GitHub Wiki
To understand what MultiMarkdown is, you first should be familiar with Markdown. The best description of what Markdown is comes from John Gruber's Markdown web site:
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).
Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the online Dingus.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email. [#Gruber][]
[#Gruber]: Daring Fireball: Markdown.
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
Markdown is great, but it lacked a few features that would allow it to work with documents, rather than just pieces of a web page.
I wrote MultiMarkdown in order to leverage Markdown's syntax, but to extend it to work with complete documents that could ultimately be converted from text into other formats, including complete XHTML documents, LaTeX, PDF, RTF, or even (shudder) Microsoft Word documents.
In addition to the ability to work with complete documents and conversion to other formats, the Markdown syntax was lacking a few things. Michel Fortin added a few additional syntax tools when writing PHP Markdown Extra. Some of his ideas were implemented and expanded on in MultiMarkdown.
John Gruber may disagree with me, but I really did try to stick with his proclaimed vision whenever I added a new syntax format to MultiMarkdown. The quality that attracted me to Markdown the most was its clean format. Reading a plain text document written in Markdown is easy. It makes sense, and it looks like it was designed for people, not computers. To the extent possible, I tried to keep this same concept in mind when working on MultiMarkdown.
I may or may not have succeeded in this...
In the vein of Markdown's multiple definitions, you can think of MultiMarkdown as:
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A perl script to convert plain text to XHTML
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The syntax used in the plain text to describe how to convert it to XHTML
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The system of programs (perl scripts, shell commands, XSLT transforms, php scripts, etc) used to convert plain text to XHTML, and then to convert XHTML into LaTeX, PDF, RTF, etc)
You can use MultiMarkdown in a variety of ways:
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As a command-line perl program (the "default" approach)
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As a drag and drop application for Mac OS X
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Within the Scrivener application
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In a blosxom, Movable Type, Oddmuse, or other web site
The MultiMarkdown package can be downloaded:
Information about MultiMarkdown is available on my web site:
John Gruber's original Markdown is available at his site:
Michel Fortin's PHP version of Markdown is at his site:
As above, check my web site.
Also, you can check out the MultiMarkdown discussion list:
If you questions are specific to Scrivener, you can also browse the Literate and Latte forum: