[rescue] [off-topic] What was this markup language?

[microcode at zoho.com]

I have dim memories of making a little money editing term papers on a DEC-20
in the early 1980s. It seems to me I used some kind of markup language where
the directives started with a "." character in the first column of the
line. I was able to do indenting and alignment and other text-processing stuff to
make the papers print out nicely.

Years went by and I forgot all about that. When I started wondering about it
again I thought it must have been PostScript. When I search the net now I
can't find any evidence PostScript is used as a markup language for writing
letters or papers and all the search results for postscript in the context
of letters are unhelpful. All the examples and even the stuff downloadable
from Adobe and other places seems to focus on image presentation and even
doing math rather than text markup.

Does anybody want to take a SWAG what this was? I am nearly certain it was
not Tex or LateX but I just don't remember. It seems to me it was real easy
to learn and get rolling with, that's why I suspect it wasn't LaTeX.

Next question, other than LaTeX, are there any good choices in simple markup
languages suitable for writing letters and resumes, etc.? I'm not really
happy with Open/Libre Office nor the direction it's going in. I'd like to
look into some alternative where the input stays as ASCII text.

Thanks.

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