Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Markup v. Markdown

I've been doing work for Wikipedia. Entries are written in a language called wiki markup that displays in Firefox.

Wikipedia has a nice tool that allows me to use colored syntax, but I thought there might be a program I could use, preferably w/spell checking and formatted syntax and so on, in which I could write the article and then cut and paste it into the Firefox Wikipedia Edit page.

I did a lot of research. I kept finding information about Markdown editors, not Markup. What's the difference?

I already have Pages, Text Edit, Tex-edit Plus, and I downloaded Text Wrangler 3.5.3 (which is free).

The latter looked promising. TextWrangler has an option for Markdown at the bottom of the screen. It's a drop-down menu providing a list of programming language options. Nice. But selecting Markdown doesn't give me the tools that Firefox does. It's possible that some of that is built into Wikipedia, such as the Preview function and the ability to format text in bold, italics, which Text Wrangler apparently can't do. I do like the search and replace in TextWrangler, though Tex-edit Plus might be just as good, esp. if I can learn how to do grep searches.

Can anyone clear this up? Do you understand what I'm looking for? A way to write Wikipedia pages outside Firefox and then bring them into Firefox for publishing. It would have to be a program that understands wiki markup commands, possibly with colored syntax, which allows text formatting like bold and italic, with robust search and replace, a preview function, spell checker, the ability to add proper names and new terms to the dictionary, text cleanup functions, possibly importing and exporting features.

Of course I would prefer it to be free or inexpensive. Of course I would prefer to be able to do with these things with the tools I already have.

Markdown is a specific markup language designed to produce HTML output. You can find the specification for Markdown here and a Markdown cheatsheet here. Virtually any plain text editor can be used to create Markdown source code, however a list of Markdown tools will be found here.

A markup language is a document formatting language and there are literally hundreds of markup languages. Wikipedia has a reasonably comprehensive list of markup languages here. The best known markup language is probably HTML and there are any number of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors for HTML such as Pages, Sparkle, Flux, Hype, and as many as 95 more listed in the App Store alone, not to mention non-WYSIWYG editors such as BBEdit and its free sibling TextEdit.

The BBCode used on FineTunedMac is a lightweight markup language whose output, like Markdown, is a subset of HTML that is recognized in browsers.

The markup editors you mentioned don't use colored syntax. That's a real benefit.

BBEdit supports editing 56 different programming and markup languages including Markdown and HTML and provides colored syntax support in all of them. Many (most?) professional developers would not be without BBEdit in their tool kit.

Someon's recent list:

http://beebom.com/best-text-editors-for-mac/

I'll throw my hat in for BBEdit too. Hands-down the best straight-up text editor on the market.