MultiMarkdowna

MultiMarkdown, often abbreviated as MMD, is an enhanced version of the Markdown markup language. It was developed by Fletcher Penney as a way to extend the capabilities of standard Markdown, which was originally designed for simple content creation and web publishing. MultiMarkdown adds features that allow for more complex document structures and richer content formatting, making it suitable for a wider range of writing tasks.

One of the key additions in MultiMarkdown is support for tables, footnotes, citations, cross-references, and table of contents generation. These features enable writers to create more structured and professional documents that were not easily achievable with basic Markdown alone. For instance, the ability to easily create and format tables is a significant improvement for presenting data. Footnotes and citations are essential for academic or technical writing, allowing for proper attribution and supplementary information.

MultiMarkdown also introduces syntax for defining attributes on elements, which can be used to apply CSS classes or IDs for styling purposes. This offers greater control over the visual presentation of the output, especially when converting to HTML. Additionally, it includes support for handling different output formats, such as HTML, LaTeX, and plain text, with specific syntax to control the conversion process.

The goal of MultiMarkdown is to provide a powerful yet simple plain text syntax for writing that can be easily converted into various formats. It aims to strike a balance between the ease of use of Markdown and the advanced features required for more demanding writing projects.