Outline

For a number of reasons I prefer a plain text editor (see http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~gary/wily/). It's a pain to read text with HTML markup strewn through it, so I have a very simple plain text markup, which gets converted into HTML.

~gary/bin/rc/outline [-p printfile ] [-t template] file [file ...]
Converts each named text file, writing each to file.html, using the optional template, or with the -p option converts all the files into printfile

This document is probably a decent example. See the source for this document by following the link below.
The source

Treats a text file as a collection of paragraphs. Each line is a new paragraph, except that paragraphs which start with '[' continue until a line which ends with ']', and lines which end with '\' continue onto the next line
Blank paragraphs, or paragraphs beginning with '#' are ignored.
Paragraphs beginning with '|' are treated as example text.
Paragraphs beginning with '=' are treated as already formatted HTML, and are passed through verbatim.
The first paragraph is rendered as a <H2>, and is used for the <TITLE> of the document. Other paragraphs with no indentation are rendered as <H3>s. Any indented paragraphs are rendered as unordered lists.

You can do *bold*, _italic_ and $constant-width$ text

If you provide a template document, it should include the text %(title)s where you want the title to go, and %(body)s where you want the rendered HTML to go (typically inside the BODY of the HTML document. The default template appears below:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>%(title)s</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
%(body)s
</BODY>
</HTML>