Lighweight markup (wiki) language for documenting

Question

When I write papers or documentation it makes think using LaTeX or OpenOffice is overkill as I usually only need some markup elements (bold, headlines, lists, ...) . I\'d like t

Answer 1

You could use Markdown (example) and then use Pandoc (which also works with reStructuredText and several other wiki-like syntaxes) to convert to PDF.

Answer 2

reStructuredText.

You can use Sphinx to generate HTML and LaTeX (and later PDF with pdflatex).

There is also rst2pdf, don't know if it's mature.

Answer 3

You might find that MarkDown gets pretty close to what you want.

MarkDown is a simple technique for marking up text files so that they can be post-processed into other forms. One of the nice things about MarkDown is their goal that a marked-up document should be simply readable as a straight text file:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

PanDoc looks like it might be good companian tool to convert the MarkDown straight into PDF files. There may well be other choices - PanDoc is just the best tool I found with a quick Google search.