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Introduction
As the world goes multi-platform with all of the new mobile operating systems, MultiMarkdown provides an easy way to share formatting between all of my devices. It's easy to learn (even for us mortals) and immediately useful.
--- David Sparks, MacSparky.com
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. --- John Gruber
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 HTML documents, LaTeX, PDF, ODF, 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 other things. Michel Fortin added a few additional syntax features when writing PHP Markdown Extra. Some of his ideas were implemented and expanded on in MultiMarkdown, in addition to including features not available in other Markdown implementations. These features include tables, footnotes, citation support, image and link attributes, cross-references, math support, and more.
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 program to convert plain text to a fully formatted document.
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The syntax used in the plain text to describe how to convert it to a complete document.
Writing with MultiMarkdown allows you to separate the content and structure of your document from the formatting. You focus on the actual writing, without having to worry about making the styles of your chapter headers match, or ensuring the proper spacing between paragraphs. And with a little forethought, a single plain text document can easily be converted into multiple output formats without having to rewrite the entire thing or format it by hand. Even better, you don't have to write in "computer-ese" to create well formatted HTML or LaTeX commands. You just write, MultiMarkdown takes care of the rest.
For example, instead of writing:
<p>In order to create valid
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML">HTML</a>, you
need properly coded syntax that can be cumbersome for
“non-programmers” to write. Sometimes, you
just want to easily make certain words <strong>bold
</strong>, and certain words <em>italicized</em> without
having to remember the syntax. Additionally, for example,
creating lists:</p>
<ul>
<li>should be easy</li>
<li>should not involve programming</li>
</ul>
You simply write:
In order to create valid [HTML], you need properly
coded syntax that can be cumbersome for
"non-programmers" to write. Sometimes, you just want
to easily make certain words **bold**, and certain
words *italicized* without having to remember the
syntax. Additionally, for example, creating lists:
* should be easy
* should not involve programming
[HTML]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML
Additionally, you can write a MultiMarkdown document in any text editor, on any operating system, and know that it will be compatible with MultiMarkdown on any other operating system and processed into the same output. As a plain text format, your documents will be safe no matter how many times you switch computers, operating systems, or favorite applications. You will always be able to open and edit your documents, even when the version of the software you originally wrote them in is long gone.
These features have prompted several people to use MultiMarkdown in the process of writing their books, theses, and countless other documents.
There are many other reasons to use MultiMarkdown, but I won't get into all of them here.
By the way --- the MultiMarkdown web site is, of course, created using
MultiMarkdown. To view the MMD source for any page, add .txt to the end of
the URL. If the URL ends with /, then add index.txt to the end instead.
The main MultiMarkdown page, for example, would be
http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/index.txt.
This User's Guide is designed to be viewed as a single HTML document, or as a PDF after being processed by LaTeX. When processed by MultiMarkdown and viewed as a single document, it will demonstrate many of the features that MultiMarkdown offers, and should be fairly easy to navigate.
The source text documents are actually stored in a wiki on Github so that the document can easily be worked on by anyone with a Github account:
Note: Currently, the Github wiki software supports Markdown, but not MultiMarkdown. This means that certain MultiMarkdown specific features will not work on the wiki, but will work when the source is processed by MultiMarkdown separately from the wiki.
You can download a copy of the source files using the instructions contained
at the wiki itself. Additionally, the source is linked to from within the
source project for MultiMarkdown in the documentation directory. If you
download the source, you can can compile a copy of the documentation
automatically with:
make docs
(This command requires perl to be installed --- maybe at some point I'll work on an alternative for Windows users without perl).