Special

Introducing the “Welcome to Xojo” Bundle!

New to Xojo and looking for guidance? We've put together a terrific bundle to welcome you! Xojo Bundle

This bundle includes six back issues of the magazine -- all of year 21 in printed book and digital formats -- plus a one-year subscription (beginning with 22.1) so you'll be learning all about Xojo for the next year. It's the perfect way to get started programming with Xojo. And you save as much as $35 over the non-bundle price!

This offer is only available for a limited time as supplies are limited, so hurry today and order this special bundle before the offer goes away!

Article Preview


Buy Now

Issue 10.5 ('Real World 2012')
Instant purchase and download via GumRoad!

COLUMN

Playing with Markdown

Converting Text with Perl

Issue: 10.5 (July/August 2012)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,445
Starting Page Number: 56
Article Number: 10508
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project10508.zip Updated: 2012-07-03 14:40:11

Related Web Link(s):

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Excerpt of article text...

After being involved in more than one major computer technology transition over the years, I'm a huge fan of plain text. With plain text you can be fairly certain your data will be readable generations from now. If you use another format, who knows? (A few years ago I spent a whole day converting all my WriteNow and WordPerfect files because the software that reads those only ran under Mac OS "Classic" which was going away.)

For a while I loved XML, and I still do for complicated data, but XML is ugly, complicated, and overkill for simple text documents. My new love is a markup language called Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). In fact, I like it so much I am switching the workflow of RSD from using XML-based documents to Markdown-based documents. So this very article is written in Markdown. I also already use Markdown for my personal blog and eventually I will use it for everything I write (novels, books, etc.).

Markdown was invented by John Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame). It's a clever way of formatting plain text without tags or marks. His goal was to keep the marked-up text as readable as possible. Here's an example of some Markdown:

#Lorem ipsum for heading

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.