Lightweight markup languages

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 markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging, instant messaging, and large language models, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.

BBCode ("Bulletin Board Code") is a lightweight markup language used to format messages in many Internet forum software. It was first introduced in 1998. The available "tags" of BBCode are usually indicated by square brackets ([ and ]) surrounding a keyword, and are parsed before being translated into HTML.

reStructuredText (RST, ReST, or reST) is a plain-text markup language primarily used for technical documentation and other textual data. It serves a similar role as Markdown but includes additional semantic features for more complex document structuring. Prominent, large-scale, open-source projects that rely on reStructuredText include the Python programming language community for its official documentation, the Linux kernel docs, CMake, and the LLVM compiler project.

AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook XML, but using plain text mark-up conventions. AsciiDoc documents can be created using any text editor and read “as-is”, or rendered to HTML or any other format supported by a DocBook tool-chain, i.e., PDF, TeX, Unix manpages, e-books, slide presentations, etc. Common file extensions for AsciiDoc files are adoc and historically txt (as encouraged by AsciiDoc's creator).

Pandoc is a free-software document converter, widely used as a writing tool (especially by scholars) and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

programming language

'''Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language (TOML, originally Tom's Own Markup Language') is a file format for configuration files. It is designed to be easy to read and write by being minimal'' (unlike the more-complex YAML) and by using human-readable syntax. The project standardizes the implementation of the ubiquitous INI file format (which it has largely supplanted), removing ambiguity from its interpretation. Originally created by Tom Preston-Werner, the TOML specification is open source. TOML is used in a number of software projects and is implemented by all popular programming languages.

Org Mode (also: org-mode; ) is a mode for document editing, formatting, and organizing within the free software text editor GNU Emacs and its derivatives, designed for notes, planning, and authoring. The name is used to encompass plain text files ("org files") that include simple marks to indicate levels of a hierarchy (such as the outline of an essay, a topic list with subtopics, nested computer code, etc.), and an editor with functions that can read the markup and manipulate hierarchy elements (expand/hide elements, move blocks of elements, check off to-do list items, etc.).

lightweight markup language used to document the Perl programming language

lightweight markup language

Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a templating system that is designed to avoid writing inline code in a web document and make the HTML cleaner. Similar to other template systems like eRuby, Haml also embeds some code that gets executed during runtime and generates HTML code in order to provide some dynamic content. In order to run Haml code, files need to have a extension. These files are similar to .erb or .eRuby files, which also help embed Ruby code while developing a web application.

markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax

txt2tags is a document generator software that uses a lightweight markup language. txt2tags is free software under GNU General Public License.

lightweight markup language for wikis