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Old 5th January 2016
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Default Lightweight markup languages

I need to write some documentation for some Perl scripts. The command line options, the format of the initialization files, the networking requirements, the setup and running a test to verify the working.

What is your experience with any of the so-called 'Lightweight markup languages'?

These are the ones I heard of:
Any recommendation?
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Last edited by J65nko; 5th January 2016 at 03:22 AM. Reason: fixed typo
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Old 5th January 2016
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I use Markdown; not necessarily because it's the best, but because that's the closest thing to "standard" there is today. Stack Overflow, GitHub, BitBucket, and reddit use it.
I find that switching markup languages is annoying as half the time you're typing in the wrong language. It's mostly intuitive, but there are some annoyances (like different behaviours across implementations).

I used txt2tags for a while (many of my posts in "Guides" are written by it), but switched to markdown as I didn't want to change between three markup languages (Markdown, txt2tags, Wiki). It hasn't received updates since 2010, so it seems rather dead. The chief advantage of markdown is increased flexibility, although depending on which markdown converted you use, this can also be achieved with Markdown.

reStructuredText and Textile are two other alternatives. I never used either.
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Old 5th January 2016
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I use occasionally txt2tags when a quick html output is required. Normally I use TeX for writing papers. I would suggest you also check Pandoc which is written in Haskell. You can install it on OpenBSD using Cabal Haskell package manager since Pandoc is not in ports. Cabal is in ports and works very well on OpenBSD. Pandoc converts multiple documen (light mark up) formats into each other. For man pages I would use mandoc and mdoc macros written by Kristaps Dzonsons. Unlike Groff it supports html, PosrScript outputs and of course has beautiful Ascii output. Of course mandoc just like Groff and TeX is full blown text typing system and it doesn't have light learning curve. I will finish this post with the remark that TeX (my bread and butter) is not designed for Ascii or even HTML output. Man pages is one of those rare instances (besides Music for which I use LilyPond) where TeX is not a right tool for the job.

Last edited by Oko; 5th January 2016 at 08:29 PM. Reason: Original post was typed on Android phone and suffered numerous typographic errors.
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Old 5th January 2016
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Thanks to both of your for the feedback and suggestions.

At this moment I am writing a small test file in AsciiDoc, because it claims to be "semantically equivalent to DocBook XML". Many years ago I spent some time with DocBook, but although I liked it's possibilities, I found it too much of a hassle to use.

Pandoc looks very interesting. I will definitely have a look at it.
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