Microsoft Word is popular in part because it combines typesetting or formatting with authoring. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors are common due to their ease in creating short to medium sized documents. This strength of combining formatting, display, and text authoring becomes a weakness however when attempting to change publishing formats or when documents become lengthy, as anyone who has attempted to copy a Word document into a web page or a book publishing tool can attest to.

In a previous article [Pilcrow & formatting article link] we looked at some common issues when working with software tools that mix text authoring with text formatting. Lightweight markup languages are a fairly new set of formats and software tools that are becoming popular for professional writers. By separating content from format, they allow authors to concentrate on their writing, and provide the ability to easily export text with the correct formatting for blogs, websites, professional book publishing tools, and yes, even Word and pdf formats.

The two most popular general formats of this type are CommonMark and asciidoc. These are plain text formats without hidden embedded formatting characters, so are more reliable, easier to backup, and work better with other utilities. If you are writing a book, longer article, or even just updates to your church’s blog, it may prove useful to check out some of these tools.