Editing Markdown documents with uText

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Easy as ABC

Karsten Günther

The Markdown mark up language provides an easy and fast way to format wikis and HTML pages. uText helps users of Ubuntu and its derivatives to create and edit these types of texts.

People can make sense of text by reading, but a machine needs extra instructions regarding meaning and structure to get the job done. Formatting elements provide this assistance, and they take many forms, including highlighting important content passages via italics or indicating that text consists of headings and code fragments so that the structure becomes apparent.

The term applied to this process is known as markup. When books are printed professionally, this separate step may be performed by specialists. In today's world of self-publishing, many authors do this work, often with the help of a template.

(X)HTML is the best known of these markup languages. However, it offers only a restricted amount of formatting that leads to complicated workarounds. These texts are then difficult for people to read. It became clear that a meta language was needed to make the appearance of the text more straightforward and to make the direct generation of HTML via a converter simpler. An entire series of programs now exist for these purposes, including AsciiDoc [1], Pandoc [2], and the previously mentioned Markdown [3].

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