How have I not discovered Markdown before?
I’ve been writing marketing e-mails and website copy for over a decade, and text formatting has been a constant hassle. (I’ve got a database of old articles that are borked because all of their bolds, italics, and line-returns got stripped by the system my client was using at the time.)
Markdown is a way of coding text so you can get special formatting, like the above-mentioned bolding, italics, and links, but, unlike HTML, it’s very simple and is still readable by humans””in fact, it looks a lot like things we’re accustomed to doing when we want to use formatted text but it isn’t available, like:
"I *really, really* want to make a **point** here!!!"…Which would render as “I really, really want to make a point here!”
So I’ve asked my project manager if I can start submitting work in this format, because I think it’s going to save our web team a lot of hassle. I know when I was doing web design I hated having to work with Word files””stripping out all the jumbled, awful code that program added, yet having to do a side-by-side, line-by-line comparison with the original to make sure I didn’t lose anything important from the original text.
If you write for the web, you should be using Markdown!