If you’ve ever been interested in Markdown, listen to this edition of the Mac Power User podcast.

Trust me, I know how late I am to this party. Very, very late. So late that everyone else is too busy drinking or making out in the back of the room to bother with how late it is.

But here I am, and I can’t not say it: Markdown is in the process of changing my life.

I’d read and heard about Markdown for years, and I vaguely knew that it was something I should look into. I had an inkling. But despite the efforts of smart people like John Gruber and Merlin Mann I didn’t really get Markdown until I listened to David Sparks and Katie Floyd explain what Markdown is, what it can do for you, and how to use it.

Just in case there are other stragglers like me: Markdown is a system and a tool developed by John Gruber that lets you write plain text files with simple character markup and turn them into well-formatted HTML that’s ready for the web. Since Markdown was created, others have rallied to the cause and developed ways to convert markdown text into Word docs, PDFs, RTFs, epub files, and other formats.

Sounds simple, but the ability to do work in plain text and move it seamlessly to final format you need is a big deal. It lets you simplify your tools, simplify your workflow, and get something done.

Here’s the best cheat sheet I’ve found for the basic Markdown syntax.

But enough of this. Don’t waste time reading my attempts to explain it. Listen to David and Katie, then read the information at Daring Fireball, get the tools, and try it out.

There are stand-alone tools for converting Markdown text into other formats, and Markdown support is also built into other tools including the amazing Scrivener. It is also supported by Tumblr, and plugins are available for WordPress.

On the Mac, there’s a wealth of ways to use Markdown. Now I’m looking for a good way to use it in Windows with the mighty UltraEdit.[1]

In the podcast David and Katie also talk a bit about Multimarkdown, Markdown’s over-achieving cousin that extends the system beyond what is needed for the web to include markup options that are useful for a large number of other document types. I don’t want to get dizzy or sprain anything so for now I’m just using Markdown, but I suspect I’ll dive into Multimarkdown before long. Multimarkdown includes everything in Markdown, so anything that supports Multimarkdown — like Scrivener — will handle Markdown just fine.[2]

[1] I have a very well-defined relationship with Windows: I will use it when I am paid to do so. Which I am, on a daily basis, and UltraEdit is the tool that keeps me productive and sane in that world.

[2] One thing I think Multimarkdown adds is the ability to easily manage footnotes. Sounds useful.