Get Down with Markdown

Today’s topic may not necessarily be a PowerShell topic, but it is something you should understand. Knowing how to create markdown documents is a useful adjacent skill. When you write a PowerShell module, you should create help documentation. The best tool for that today is the Platyps module which creates an intermediate set of markdown documents. You need to edit these documents before creating the external help file.

Microsoft relies heavily on markdown, and it wouldn’t surprise me if help documentation were based on markdown in a future PowerShell release. PowerShell 7 already has a few cmdlets for rendering markdown in the console, which I’ll cover later.

GitHub also relies on markdown. Your README file is almost always written in markdown. GitHub renders the documents in your browser so the reader has a rich experience. Any documentation in your repository should be written in markdown.

Learning markdown is not complicated or time-consuming. There are only a few things you need to learn. I’m hoping that after reading this and creating a markdown document from scratch, you’ll be well on your way.