The [[De Facto]] king of lightweight, stylization markup on top of [[Plain Text Durability|plain text]] is undeniably [[Markdown]]. There are, however, a surprising number of competing syntaxes that try to address some [[Markdown#Criticisms]].
```mermaid
flowchart LR
n4("More flexible, fewer features<br>") ---> n5("More rigid, more features")
n1["Markdown"] --> n2["Textile"]
n2 --> n3["AsciiDoc"]
style n4 stroke:#616161,fill:#757575,color:#FFFFFF
style n5 fill:#757575,color:#FFFFFF
```
# AsciiDoc
AsciiDoc has a lot more functionality baked-in, thus does not need extensions. It includes macros for things like table of contents.
## Example
```AsciiDoc
= Document Title
:toc:
:url-gitlab: https://gitlab.eclipse.org
A paragraph with *bold* and _italic_ text.
A link to https://eclipse.org[Eclipse].
A reusable link to {url-gitlab}[GitLab].
image::an-image.png[An image,800]
== Section title
* Unordered list item
** Add another marker to make a nested item
* Another unordered list item
NOTE: One of five built-in admonition block types.
=== Subsection title
Text indented by one space is preformatted.
A source block with a Ruby function named `hello` that prints "`Hello, World!`":
[,ruby]
----
def hello name = 'World'
puts "Hello, #{name}!"
end
----
```
# Textile
Textile predates Markdown. It covers every case Markdown covers and more, and includes mechanisms for specifying things like CSS styling. It uses `Block Modifiers`, which are short strings placed at the front of paragraphs to indicate what kind of styling/tags should be used in the block (e.g. the `h2.` below creates a level 2 Heading).
I do like textile.
## Example
```textile
h2. Textile
* is a _shorthand syntax_ used to generate valid HTML
* is *easy* to read and *easy* to write
* can generate complex pages, including: headings, quotes, lists, tables and figures
My mother has %{color:green;}green% eyes.
```
# Restructured Text
The primary markup language used by Sphinx, the main Python [[Code Auto-Documentation]] tool. It's weirder. Don't even care to include an example.
****
# More
## Source
- https://asciidoc.org/
- https://textile-lang.com/
- https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/user/rst/quickref.html
## Related