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 to write my documents using a wiki style markup as this is very efficient.

For example:

= Introduction =
'''HTML''' is a markup language...

In the end I'd like to simply convert it to PDF. (Cross-platform was nice too.)

compiler.exe -pdf input.wiki output.pdf

Is there a tool (or simple tool chain) to do this job?

I'd personally like to not make use of LaTeX as a transformation step. There are tools doing this job transforming lightweight syntax to TeX and then to PDF/PS.

Answer 1

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.