Markdown & MarkAPL

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What is Markdown?

• Ordinary text
• Simple mark-up rules
• Readable and maintainable
• Markdown ==> valid HTML5

Note: it's a writing format rather than a publishing format.

Markdown is useful for…

• editing “ReadMe” files.
• editing pages for your web site.
• writing nicely formatted emails.
• creating a presentation.
• writing an article for Vector.
• creating or maintaining content for MiServer.
• Writing a (cook) book ;)
• …

History, Specification

• 2004: John Gruber & Aaron Swartz
• From 2005 until 2011: chaos
• 2012: CommonMark http://commonmark.org/
• Internet media type text/markdown (IETF) underway

  As of March 2016:

  • RFC 7763
  • RFC 7764

Competitors?!

• AsciiDoc
• Texttile
• Creole
• reStructuredText
• AsciiDoc

  They all have their pros and cons…

Is Markdowndown better than any of them?

Definitely not!

But: the war is over, and the winner is: Markdown!

Big boys

• GitHub
• Stack Overflow
• SourceForge
• Open Streetmap
• Reddit
• Slack
• Trello
• Diaspora
• and many others

Smaller boys

• Dyalog (MiServer)
• Dyalog user command ]adoc_user
• APL wiki pages (one day)

MarkAPL

• Dyalog class
• Markdown ==> HTML5
• Part of the APLTree project (totally free software)
• Available for download from http://download.aplwiki.com

Why a Dyalog solution?

• Easier to integrate.
• We can add features as we please:
  • Table-of-contents
  • Function calls
  • Typographical sugar
  • Simplified bookmark links
  • Headers can be numbered
  • Defining data (key-value pairs) within Markdown
  • Use the lamp (⍝) for commenting out a line
• There seems to be a converter available in any other programming language.

Examples

• This slide show
• Launchy “readme” file
• Vector article
• ADOC

Ideas

HTML-to-Markdown converter

You don't want to convert your HTML files manually to Markdown, do you?

Markdown-to-HTML converter

Having a class that does all the hard work is just the first step; an application is required that converts Markdown fils to HTML files:

• Via the command line
• Watching directories as a Windows Service or a daemon
• Drag-and-drop onto the EXE file (Windows only)
• Drag-and-drop onto the GUI (Windows only)

Markdown editor