One of the staples of aesthetic beauty in typography is coherency. Markdown allows to reach that easily. This is also why so many Word products look so amateur

One of the staples of aesthetic beauty in typography is coherency. Markdown allows to reach that easily. This is also why so many Word products look so amateurish, or downright tiring to read: differences in spacing, font, color, all these make for an awful end result which is also annoying to maintain[1]. All in all this is akin to provisioning instead of scripting: you declare _what you want_ (a pull-out quote) instead of _how to do it_, letting the compiler take care of the rest. The downside of markdown is that it is a two phase compose/preview system, which has been resolved with dual panes up to now. But it is not a showstopper, especially considering that professional copywriters already compose stories separate from presentation[2]. [1]: Yes, I know that Word has _styles_. Which are kind of similar in intent to markdown's #, >, *, even though they are not always semantically significant, and they also include presentation. [2]: InDesign's story editor: http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-editor.png http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-...