Any call for Markdown?

Is anybody interested in an application to convert markdown to HTML? Get it as a zip file from here .
You need RiscLua 6.3 to run it. It is a conversion of Niklas Frykholm’s program, written in Lua 5.1, for Unix. This is a quick and dirty conversion to Lua 5.3 with a few changes for RISC OS. Unfortunately it is rather slow because it is a string transformer. It could rewritten to be much more efficient, without the traditional multiplicity of commandline flags, and to run without needing RiscLua, but I am not sure if it is worth the effort. Anyway, if you do play with it and find some bugs please let me know.

Hmm, when I were a lad, _this_ meant something was underlined and /this/ meant something was italicised. Wherever did the idea of underscores for italics come from, and why don’t these sorts of things support underlining any more?

I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for a three line whip! ☺

Hmmm. For us publishing folks, one underlines a word that you want to be italicized, and if you want it bold, you underline it with a wiggly line…but that’s red pen copy-editing markup, of course, not something one can do from the keyboard…

Precisely. Everybody has their favourite way of marking down, which explains why from John Gruber onwards there has been a multiplicity of formats. Besides it is more fun to invent your own system than learn someone else’s.

Everybody has their favourite way of marking down

I could swear that this always used to be referred to as mark up.

Is this another one of those transpondian things like taking a number of items and then the same again being referred to by transpondians as “double down” when the quantity has quite clearly increased and therefore the correct phrase is “double up”
I’m ambivilent about the difference between “button up” and “button down” clothing although a “button up” trouser fly is more descriptive of the actual sequence of fastening.

Well HTML is called markup so you would have thought so, yeah.

Maybe markup is when text is properly formatted, while markdown is more “suggestions” of styling? Just a guess…

“Marking down” is what a market trader does at the end of the day, to try to get rid of the last of his or her stock. Mrs Malaprop is alive and well.

Mrs Malaprop is alive and well.

Indeed so.
I wonder if the transpondian users of “normalcy” when they mean “normality” will ever click to the fact that normalcy actually means “at right angles / perpendicular to”?
Interesting way to demonstrate that you aren’t in line with the rest of the world/universe isn’t it?

Marking things up is presumably by analogy with chalking things up, which is the same as putting them down on the slate. I take it that markdown is so called because it is not HTML. Well, we have not run out of directions yet. How about markright, markleft, mark-all-about, markdeasil, markwiddershins ?