Multiple headers with the same content and.These rules cover most of the aspects of Markdown compliance that you would expect, such as: It is distributed as a Ruby gem, and it can lint both individual as well as nested directories of Markdown files for compliance with a documented set of 38 rules. Written in Ruby, Markdown Lint is self-described as:Ī tool to check markdown files and flag style issues. So for those reasons, that’s why I’m starting with it. However, it’s likely one that lets you get up and running quickly until you’re ready to migrate to something more suitable.

Sure, as Eric Holscher (the Read the Docs and Write the Docs lead) well says, it’s not a format that you want to use long-term for technical writing. It’s supported by a significant number of tools and services, including WordPress, GitHub, GitHub Pages, JetBrains, Octopress, Jekyll, and Ghost.

It’s a format that is pretty trivial to learn.

However, it has several advantages going for it. It might seem strange to start with Markdown, as it’s not as feature-rich as other formats, such as AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, or DocBook. In this 4-part series, I’m starting, by covering MarkdownLint, as Markdown is arguably the most prolific writing format used today. Whether you’re just starting as a technical writer, taking over from someone else, coming on to an existing team, or you’re a seasoned technical writing pro, you’ll have a further 5 tools to help you ensure that the quality of the documentation that you produce is of the highest possible quality. Each of them is usable from the command-line, whether manually or as part of your documentation build pipeline. In this series, I’m going to introduce you to 4 tools that help you do just that. When writing technical documentation, as with writing code, you need to use a range of tools to maintain a high level of quality. How do you know that your Markdown content is valid? You use MarkdownLint! In this post, I step through how to install, configure, and use it, as well as how to use one-time rule overrides.īefore we dive in, I need to set the scene.

Jetbrains webstorm view markdown