Due to "popular demand", PerlMonks now supports Markdown formatting for writeups. Note: Initially, Markdown is only supported for comments (aka notes). If everyone likes it, we will extend the capability to root-level posts as well (SOPW posts, etc.)

Some relevant past discussions:

• Making Perl Monks a better place for newbies (and others)
• Wiki-Style syntax for posting
• better wiki-like shortcuts.
• Markdown syntax useful to the Monastery?

Sorry it took me a minute to implement this feature. :-D

To enable the use of Markdown in your comments, go to your User Settings and change the "Format writeups as:" selection from 'conventional' to 'markdown'.

Be aware that this is a global setting. You can't select the format at the time you submit the writeup.

When you are looking at a writeup entry box (textarea), you will see a short note immediately above it indicating which markup you can use.

This change was actually relatively simple to implement, since modules for converting markdown to HTML already existed.
I would like to know if there is any demand for any other Lightweight markup languages.
For example, we could add support for Textile or some flavor of wiki text.