Authoring resources

AsciiDoc

AsciiDoc is a plain text markup language for writing technical content. It’s packed with semantic elements and equipped with features to modularize and reuse content. AsciiDoc content can be composed using a text editor, managed in a version control system, and published to multiple output formats.

28 Jan 2024CommonMark version 0.31.2

It’s a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet.

19 Jun 2018The Darwin Information Typing Architecture

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specification defines a set of document types for authoring and organizing topic-oriented information, as well as a set of mechanisms for combining, extending, and constraining document types.

06 Feb 2024DocBook 5.2

DocBook is a schema (available in several languages including RELAX NG, SGML and XML DTDs). It is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications).

Hypertext Markup Language

HTML is the World Wide Web's core markup language. Originally, HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents. Its general design, however, has enabled it to be adapted, over the subsequent years, to describe a number of other types of documents and even applications.

31 Oct 2024ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2024, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, version 1.4

Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an application of NISO Z39.96-2024, which defines a set of XML elements and attributes for tagging journal articles and describes three article JATS. models is a continuation of the NLM Archiving and Interchange DTD work begun in 2002 by NCBI.

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read pmarkup language.[9] Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.

Markless

Markless is a new markup standard that focuses on being intuitive and fast to parse. Being a purely text-based markup, no complicated editor software is required to create documents in it. With its focus on intuition and consistency it should also be a good fit as a markup choice for text based platforms such as chat, forums, etc. Markless does not specify its results based on another document format, meaning that an implementation could be written to turn a Markless document into practically any other format. Markless is strict and does not allow for any ambiguities in its markup. This both makes it less confusing for the user, and easier to parse for a program. Being based on a specification rather than a reference implementation, Markless also offers the users a much more stable and reliant source to turn to in case of questions about the behaviour of an implementation.

microformats

microformats are HTML for marking up people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes, recipes etc. Sites use microformats to publish a standard API that is consumed and used by search engines, browsers, and other web sites. See what-are-microformats for more.

Org Mode

A GNU Emacs major mode for keeping notes, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and more — in a fast and effective plain text system.

06 Aug 2025ReSpec

ReSpec makes it easier to write technical documents. It was originally designed for writing W3C specifications, but now supports many output formats.

24 Jan 2025TEI P5

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) is an international organization whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts. The Consortium publishes the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange: an international and interdisciplinary standard that is widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching.

XSLTdoc

XSLTdoc is a Javadoc-like tool for documenting XSLT. The XSLTdoc tool defines conventions for documenting XSLT source files. The tool extracts these comments and builds documentation as a set of HTML pages. The documentation includes pages that display the XSLT source code with syntax highlighting, among many other features.