On Tue, 16 Mar 2021 09:02:40 +0000, Timothy Collinson
<xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:

>Markdown I've not heard of, but will investigate.

Markdown is a relatively new markup language, rather than an
application. It's designed to be easily converted into other forms,
but even when left alone, documents in it are easily human-readable.

In some ways, it's a throwback to the days of plain text - you
indicate *italics like this*, **bold like this**, and ***both like
this***; paragraphs are separated by white space like in email,
blockquoted material is prefixed by > (again, just like email), tables
are actually drawn out, and so on.

The original definition of Markdown can be found at
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax but had some
inconsistencies and ambiguities; https://commonmark.org/
("CommonMark") describes a more consistent and unambiguous version
that is becoming a *de facto* standard baseline, with
https://github.github.com/gfm/ ("GitHub-Flavored Markdown" or "GFM")
being a commonly-used extended version of the language, supporting
tables, check-box lists, and a couple of other features useful in a
GitHub-type environment.

(Markdown is an acceptable format for submissions to Freelance
Traveller.)