Markdown

In short, markdown is a simplified form of markup language. Unlike conventional languages such as HTML, markdown requires less symbols to represent common formats like header, subheader, etc.

Users do not need special programs to see a markdown page. CCMS does the translation with the help of third party decoder, provided by Michel Fortin and John Gruber. You can indeed find it insertable into existing PHP scripts.

You can see the homepage and cheatsheet for more information and even inspiration - Rethink: Should our world be in pairs of tags only?

It is not easy to have individual format change such as the one in MS Word. First of all, this kind of design is inconsistent. Secondly, languages like markdown are not designed for this purpose. In short, the short-coming of markdown drives you away from having inconsistent design. Format change is possible by changing the CSS template file instead.

To have a page written in markdown, prepare a file with .markdown extension.