Introduction

CuteMarkEd is an application to record text in markdown notation. This is an easy to learn writing notation, developed by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. It allows fast writing of plain text, that can be transformed into nice HTML with the appropriate tool: CuteMarkEd.

The basic rules of markdown trace back to highlighting parts of a wording in plain text e-mails. Outlook and others made this forgotten, because of the WYSIWYG-edtiors, they use. There you can pick italics, bold or strikethru from a toolbar. In ancient times you helped yourself for highlighting by embracing parts of plain text using symbols or in front of a paragraph. This is the root of markdown. Not realy new, but developed to date.

[c]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wysiwyg "What you see is what you get → Background information from Wikipedia")

Short description

CuteMarkEd is an easy to use editor for the popular Markdown markup language. It features a themed live preview, export to PDF or HTML format, source code highlighting, spell checking and math expression support.

Table of Contents
Getting Started

What´s the point?

You may ask yourself, why you should reduce to simple things when you have more advanced ones. Depending on the view there are different answers.

• By writing I have my hands on the keyboard, symbols for formatting are directly accessible. I can simply type them. No mouse or special key sequence required. This speeds up writing dramatically.

• The generated text is plain text. No control commands confuse a program where I want to import my text. Possibly the notation is not comparable to the way CuteMarkEd does. But I can transfer my texts to anywhere I want them to be. Markdown can be transferred into desired formatting simply by search and replace in a different application.

  By this, you can easily exchange data across borders of operating systems and application restrictions. Plain text is the oldest ever and with large probability it will still work, when several dialects like HTML, RTF, XML and others are no more in use in the current form. Remarkably, that the last ones are based on plain text, simply expanded with individual formatting codes for interpreted displaying.