Styled Text Formatting

There are many ways to style plain text. Current mechanisms include text-to-html in Wikis, blogs, and forums. Before that, setext and e-mail also had conventions for text styling. The quote character (>) in e-mail replies is one of those conventions. Markdown is clear spin-off from those attempts.

The list includes Markup languages HTML, BB code, MarkDown, reStructuredText, Trac, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, LaTeX, and ConTeXt. For the interested few, you may also want to look at DocBook, CSS, WakkaWiki, Setext, atx, Textile, Grutatext, and EtText. Wikipedia's List of Lightweight markup language also gives a short comparison.

Obviously, the purpose of these markup languages differs. While CSS and BB Code focus on the font layout, other language such as DocBook, MarkDown and XMHTML focus mostly on the text structure. Unfortunately, only few languages have such a clear distinction between structure and layout, and we see lots of markup languages that mix this up, such as LaTeX and HTML (despite their false promises to distinguish between the two).

Typesetting
The tables above do not contain font size changes, centered text and lesser used features such as slanted (oblique), overbar (the opposite of underline), small capitals, etc. For these features, consult the documentation of each markup language.

Lists
Some markup languages (HTML, MarkDown) allow multiple paragraphs within a list, but most don't allow this (Mediawiki, BB code)

Text Blocks
For other layout elements such as horizontal lines, floats, etc. consult the documentation of the respective markup language.

Hypertext
Some markup language have special features to link to e-mail addresses next to web pages. Consult the documentation for each respective markup language for details.