Your 5 favorite articles about markup

Your quick-start guide to Markdown

Markdown is a simplified document markup system that makes it easy to write documentation quickly. Most people find Markdown easy to learn because it is based on de facto standards that developers adopted long ago when writing their own documentation in plain text. Here's a brief overview of the most common formatting that you can do with Markdown.

Learning to love groff -ms

The -ms macro package makes it easy to prepare documents that look great anywhere. More recently, I started learning how to use -ms to create professional looking PDF content. Let's explore how to get started with groff -ms to create documents.

• To see how to write an academic article using groff, you might also like Writing an academic article in groff -ms.
• If you'd like to learn how to use the refer pre-processor to generate in-text citations, also read Making references in groff.

How I formatted a book with groff

This year, for my wife's birthday, I wanted to surprise her by printing her thesis from 2000. However, I didn't want to just print the original PDF. My wife struggled to get Word to format her document the way she wanted, and while the final product looks great, you can spot a few formatting errors if you look closely. Instead, I used groff -ms to reformat her thesis into a professional book, including images and equations.

How markup works: collecting words

Markup languages all share one common rule: they collect words and fill paragraphs, and rely on markup to control the formatting. In this popular article, Jim shows how to write a sample program that collects words to fill paragraphs.

Math in HTML

The mathematical markup language (or MathML) has been part of HTML since version5, and has been standardized by ISO since 2015. Since then, all modern browsers support MathML formatting, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. Let's get started with just a few basic elements in MathML.