Interesting that we could see a unified Markdown mark long before we can ever hope to see a unified Markdown specification.
(Most implementors feel Markdown could use some expansion — see MultiMarkDown, PHP Markdown Extra, Python Markdown — but Gruber is having none of it and stopped moderating the group, and no consensus has been reached about how to unify the various flavors, except that it can’t be done without significant time investment and a rough consensus.)
At some point several years ago, I was naming all my markdown files like foo.m↓, but after a while I decided that foo.mdown probably plays nicer w/ typical software. :-)
I actually much prefer your logo, the arrow being part of the 'M' is (for me) more aseptically pleasing, too bad you didn't put yours forward as universal mark down symbol.
Edit: Having said that, I think Dustin's is probably easier to understand without explanation.
I disagree. It's looks cool but it's too easy to confuse with a fancy down-pointing arrow. Unless you know you're looking for the 'M', you probably won't notice it.
The problem with this one is that once you make more general by removing embedded effect and make it black and white only, it does not look that good any more.
It feels like an action button, like I'm going to download something. Something like http://imgur.com/T2muH seems simpler (forgive the crude 2 minute execution)
Nice one. But we're I think we're talking about referring to Markdown from README (e.g. "our comments system supports Markdown"), not that the content of README is written in Markdown.
There's been some talk recently about somewhat ridiculous symbols representing attribution. Sometimes, a good icon or symbol works really well; other times less so. I think this is a nice idea and looks well-executed.
I don't think a concise symbol is needed. A Markdown area, when activated, should have some sort of sidebar hint to give basic examples of the syntax, and that takes enough space that Markdown can be used as a word. Recognition might be speedier for the spelled-out word, too. Before the user decides to input something, advertising Markdown support isn't very important.
I'd say he's almost too particular for an M with a down arrow in a rounded rectangle.
However, what's the corner radius? What's the width of the stroke on the M? The depth of the point of the arrow or the width of its sweep?
It seems like he's got the spacing and sizing of line-width elements specified to a 'T' (or an 'X' as the case may be), but can we typeset the M in, say, Times? Can the down arrow be a chevron instead?
Particular, but if he's going for particular he's taking it nearly far enough. :P
Thanks, I was confused by the strange mix of very clear specs and no specs while referencing the absent specs, too.
Bullet points 1 and 2, for instance:
1. Do not change the aspect ratio of the rounded box enclosure.
2. Do not change the border radius of the rounded box enclosure.
Neither of these properties were defined as far as I could see. Perhaps it's one of those cases where you're expected to "see" it from the graphics; I typically don't operate well that way. :)
also there's at least two more measurements missing from the spec graphic--the distance between the M and the arrow and the distance between the arrow and the right edge. i assume those are both X, but it doesn't actually say....
If he really wanted to enforce those conditions, all of which have to do with not changing the mark, he could have just used a Creative Commons NoDerivative license (with some exceptions if desired) instead of BSD. Software licenses are better suited to software, whereas this is more like artwork (although the boundary between software and artwork is kinda blurry nowadays).
He's trying to set his fingerprint, and codifying the layout, attempting to formalize it, would be just such a method.
Personally -- and apologies if this sounds brash as I don't think we need empty back patting here -- I think his proposed logo is ugly and amateurish. The M already has an arrow in it if one really needs to make such a literal indicator.
It's hard to get a clearer, simpler symbol than that, and it's the creation of an 'open' symbol like this that I predict will play a big role in driving adoption of the Markdown format on a wider scale than is seen today.
It's because your desktop system lacks an appropriate font.
The GNU Unifont, which is GPL licensed, support all the basic unicode characters (that's 65,536 characters!) and can be downloaded from here: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
If you use Debian (and possibly in other Linux distros), you can just install the ttf-unifont package.
[pedantic^2]:
They do not claim 65536 characters, but 65536 code points. That range contains room for 2K surrogate pairs, 6k or so of private use area, some control characters, and I think there still are some small unassigned regions (http://unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/).
While this may be true, people can't be expected to go tracking down and installing a font just to see the characters that don't happen to be rendering in your site / app. Another solution is required, such as normal ascii brackets.
In any case, I agree, but the proper solution should be for OSs to come with fonts to cover that Unicode spectrum. It eliminates much of the utility of having Unicode in the first place if you can't safely use them.
This would be really great as an addition to the icons that already ship with Twitter Bootstrap, something like that would really speed up the adoption of this as a standard.
My question is on the adoption on text based interfaces, like HN input. Using html entities … ...
Html entities save a better explicit defination in web.
Image rendering will get you there, building another context will definitely ease adoption.
What do you think?
"M" could stand for almost anything, and the bold style reminds me more of a "Metro is that way" than "Markdown below". On the other hand this one http://dribbble.com/shots/424394-Markdown looks much more self-explaining.
I like many of these much more than the submitted version in the original article.
I wonder though, shouldn't any serious effort to do this try to get Gruber on board? He seems to have some design sense and declaring "this is the markdown logo" without his approval just seems a bit.. disrespectful?
At first glance, the second one might appear to be a better mark. However, if you don't know what it stands for, or that the top part of it is an M, the graphic is just an ordinary arrow. It doesn't accomplish the primary goal of the design.
Good logos don't beat you over the head with what they mean. The original version is pretty amateur in that respect IMO, it is almost the first thing anybody would come up with.
Having a bit of delight and 'aha!' in a logo is a good thing.
I've noticed quite a few Mac and iOS apps using Markdown lately. If anything it seems to be gaining adoption. Of course this isn't based on any actual data just my own observations. Perhaps a Windows user can chime in and comment about it's growth from their perspective.
I'd love to see it being used in more blog commenting systems.
The original Perl script gets very little use, but the formatting conventions established by Markdown have become enormously popular the past few years, displacing older conventions like BBCode.
Some implementations (like the one here on HN) support only a couple of features. It's more of an archetype than a proper standard.
I am having trouble with the specification: it is defined in terms of "the M glyph", but a glyph is not a graphic. Does the specification fix a particular font?
The M icon in the Markdown Mark was created out of a modified version of the M from Gill Sans Bold (you probably should not try to recreate the mark using Gill Sans because of the modifications to the crotch on the M).
http://potch.me/markdown-mark.html