Editing Courses/EPUB/day2 (section)

== Markdown ==
John Gruber, with substantial contributions from Aaron Swartz, created the Markdown language in 2004 with the goal of enabling people "to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, and optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)”.

Markdown is simple markup language which uses common, easily readable symbols such as #, * and _ to define document formatting. 

Markdown was originally developed for blogs, as a quick and easy way of writing texts that would be eventually be converted into HTML. 

It easiness-to-read and write, but also its limited scope (e.g. titles can only look like titles if they are marked as headings), make it ideal as a intermediary format between the source manuscript and the EPUB publication.

HTML snippets can also be added to a markdown file. when converted to HTML/EPUB it will retain the added HTML.

=== Markdown Software === 
* any plain text editor can edit Markdown
* [Macdown http://macdown.uranusjr.com/] - WYSIWYG for Mac
* [Byword http://bywordapp.com/] - another WYSIWYG for Mac
* [Markdown viewer https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer] - Firefox add-on