What are document markup languages?

A program like Microsoft Word is a WYSIWYG approach to creating documents. The document writer can see the format of the document as they write it.

This approach is helpful in that almost anyone can use Word - it takes no time to learn.

The challenge with this approach is that when it comes to large documents with multiple chapters like a book, Word becomes very inefficient. It becomes very Intensive on the computer to try and format a huge document in Word - the application slows down, can crash and producing formatting changes can be very awkward getting things consistent across the document.

Writing documents in markup languages like LaTeX, DocBook or HTML is a different approach. It takes a little more effort to learn since the document author has to learn the syntax of the markup language to explicitly say what each section of text is meant to mean - a paragraph, a heading etc. But markup languages allow the documents to be broken up into smaller files and then ‘compiled’ by a program into the final readable format.

An experienced author using a markup language can write faster than one using Word for large documents. The use of markup allows the author to completely focus on the content of what one is trying to communicate rather than how it is formatted.

Formatting can instead be handled at the end of the project by manipulating the rules for formatting in one place and seeing how it looks. Good markup compilers usually do a good job of formatting the text in a very readable consistent way.

I learned this when I wrote my thesis in LaTeX - I had a breeze at the end of my thesis relative to my contemporary economics students who where struggling with all sorts of formatting issues and stability struggles since they were using Microsoft Word.

This is an example of LaTeX markup:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
\title{This is an example of LaTeX}
\author{Eliot Muir \thanks{for learning about markup languages}}
\subsection{This is a subsection title}
LaTeX has a higher learning curve than Word initially but it makes it easy to write
large documents and consistently format them in a beautiful way.
\end{document}

This is an example of HTML markup (as used for authoring web pages):

<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>
This is a paragraph.
</p>