What Markdown is, and why it outlived twenty years of formats
A five-minute read. Nothing to install to follow along.
Markdown is a way to write formatted text without leaving the text. You type **important** and get important; you type # Heading and get a heading. There are few marks, they fit in your memory in an afternoon, and they never disappear from the file — because the file is still plain text.
The file is the format
A .docx is a zip archive with XML inside. Open it in a plain text editor and you see binary noise. A .md opened the same way shows exactly what you wrote, marks and all — readable by a human, by a program, and by you in fifteen years.
That is why it has survived since 2004 while more capable formats came and went. There is no reader version that can be missing. There is no company that can shut down. The worst case for a Markdown file is that you read the marks along with the text.
The marks that cover almost everything
In practice six constructs cover most of what a document needs:
# Heading,## Subheading— hierarchy, one to six#**bold**and*italic*- item— list;1. item— numbered list[text](address)— link> quote`code`between backticks
The rest — tables, task lists, strikethrough — came later with GitHub, and became the de facto standard that nearly every editor understands today.
Where it does not help
Markdown does not position things. If your document needs a text box in the top right corner, two columns of different heights, or an image with text wrapping around it, Markdown is the wrong tool — and insisting costs more time than opening a visual editor.
What it does very well is text documents with hierarchy: proposals, reports, contracts, articles, documentation. Which is to say: almost everything written to be read.
Writing Markdown without looking at Markdown
The honest objection to Markdown is that it makes you look at marks instead of at your document. An editor that draws the result as you type settles that: the # becomes a large heading immediately, the ** disappears and the word turns bold, and the file underneath is still the same plain text.
That is what KempDec Markdown does, and it is why the editor screen carries the measurements of the PDF page: what you see while writing is what comes out when you export. No conversion step, no surprise at the end.