This is part of my article about plain text formatting.

reStructured Text

From this:

**I write in plain text a lot**.  I want to put stuff on the web 
a lot. Oftentimes it's the stuff I already wrote in plain text.  I wondered if I 
could learn some conventions that would **convert to XHTML for no extra 
work** after I'd written the plain text.  In fact, I am writing this 
article now in Ultraedit_ and later it will go on bluebones.net_ in HTML.  
And as I wrote ultraedit I wanted to put a link in for that very reason but 
wasn't sure whether to or not because it then makes this file html and I'd need 
to go back and put in 
 tags and so on.  Let's just say that I think 
learning one of these formats would be A Good Idea(tm).

.. _ultraedit: http://www.ultraedit.com/
.. _bluebones.net: http://bluebones.net/

For those wondering **why I don't write in HTML all the time** 
check out `these good reasons`_.

.. _these good reasons: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml

This seems to have been the `rationale behind Markdown`_.  There are also 
numerous other text formats like Textile_ and `Almost Free Text`_
with similar or identical motivations.  I don't want to learn them all, so which 
one to pick?  I couldn't find a good comparison or even much of a list of 
alternatives via Google.  Answer: have a face off.

.. _rationale behind Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/2004/03/dive_into_markdown
.. _Textile: http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/
.. _Almost Free Text: http://www.maplefish.com/todd/aft.html

The Test
--------

I thought I'd trial them on the text of `this very article`_.

.. _this very article: http://bluebones.net/news/default.asp?action=read_story&story_id=94

Some things I definitely want the winner to be able to do are:

* Unordered lists
* Like this one

and

::

    # Code examples like this.
    print "This is essential!"

The quality of tools available is also a big plus.  For this to reap rewards 
I must be able to go effortlessly from text to XHTML and (strongly preferred) 
back again.

To this:

# Code examples like this.
print "This is essential!"