Why Wysimark?

Before creating Wysimark, we tried a lot of markdown editors but none of them resulted in a beautiful, easy-to-use (for non-developers), WYSIWYG editor that generated proper Markdown.

We found that there were three kinds of Markdown editors, and all of them lacked features that would make what we believed was a good WYSIWYG Markdown editor feature complete:

• Does not support parts of the Markdown specification: Implementing the first 80% of Markdown specification is easy, but the last 20% is hard. For example nesting in block quotes.

• Are not WYSIWYG: End users prefer WYSIWYG editing like in Google Drive or Microsoft Word and don't want to see code.

• Generate broken Markdown code: Most editors generate broken Markdown in certain cases. For example, when you bold a word and include the trailing space, most editors generate my **bold **text. This is invalid Markdown and will not produce bold text because the word needs to be directly inside of the asterisks like my **bold** text.

• Does not support image uploads: Most editors support inserting an image through a URL, but require you to upload the image through a separate service.

There are other options for creating Markdown documents. Wysimark was created because the other options lacked some or all of these features:

• Were not WYSIWYG

• Did not support the full markdown specification

• Did not maintain strict comp

Most options fell into one of three camps:

1. Textarea: Users edit plain text in a textarea with buttons that insert markdown code directly into the text.

2. WYSIWYM: Users edit in a format that shows the Markdown code and adds a formatting layer on top. This can feel familiar to developers, but