1. The APT format

The APT format (Almost Plain Text) is a simple markup language (like HTML) than can be used to write simple article-like documents (like HTML). Unlike HTML, APT uses as few markup as possible to express the structure of the document. Instead, APT uses paragraph indentation.

Example:

This is the title of a section  
  
  This is a paragraph which contains several sentences. Sentence one. Sentence
  two. Sentence three. This paragraph is followed by a bulleted list.

      * List item 1.

      * List item 2. This <word> will be rendered in italic.
        This other <<word>> will be rendered in bold.

      * List item 3.

Even if APT has been created in order to be comfortable to use with a plain text editor, a plug-in has been developed to make XXE support the APT format. (This plug-in is bundled with XXE.)

Aptconvert is an OpenSource command-line tool that can be used to convert the APT format to HTML, XHTML, PDF, PostScript, (MS Word loadable) RTF, DocBook SGML and DocBook XML. Aptconvert can be downloaded from www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html.