Textaria

Textaria is a lightweight markup language and rendering system designed for composing structured documents in plain text. It emphasizes semantic clarity and human readability, enabling writers to mark sections, lists, code blocks, and metadata without relying on complex markup.

Textaria originated as a community project in the early 2010s, with contributors from independent publishers and developer communities. It evolved through several revisions and open governance, with its main repository hosting proposals, implementations, and documentation.

The core idea of Textaria is to use simple, human-friendly tokens to indicate document structure. Writers use tags such as [Title], [Section], [Subsection], [Paragraph], [List], [Code], and [Note], along with indentation to express hierarchical structure. Optional front matter can include metadata like author, date, and tags. The syntax prioritizes readability of the source document, even before rendering.

Textaria provides rendering backends that translate Textaria documents into formats such as HTML, PDF, and ePub. Engines can be extended with plugins for syntax highlighting, citations, footnotes, and cross-references. The approach aims to keep rendering deterministic and predictable, while allowing customization of styling through separate templates.

Adoption and reception: Textaria has seen use in independent publishing, technical documentation, and some wiki projects seeking lightweight markup. It is appreciated for its readable source and straightforward hierarchy but has a smaller ecosystem compared to more established markup languages, and lacks a single dominant toolchain.

See also:

- Markup language

- Lightweight markup

- Semantic markup

- Documentation authoring