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I may not be very knowledgeable about this but I am really curious about knowing any tool or utility available for PC to format Stack Overflow posts. I am asking this question because I have seen that the built-in editor offers a very limited set of formatting options, especially based on text selection. Further code formatting is a big challenge and I see a lot of badly-formatted posts, especially in terms of code.

So please let me know about some good available tools or utilities that offers this kind of enhanced auto-formatting options for text and code, so that I may be less bothered about it.

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    The format used is Markdown. You could search for a Markdown editing application. Oh, and please don't mark things as code when they are not.
    – Bart
    Nov 8, 2012 at 4:06
  • @Bart, really thanks just got the MarkdownPad as per your valuable comments. Also is there any StackOverflow tool that works directly from your PC including this Markdown editing options?
    – Furqan Safdar
    Nov 8, 2012 at 4:16

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Yes, there are lots of badly-formatted posts... but it's really not that hard to format posts well within the editor. When someone's used tabs instead of spaces, that can be pain to fix in the browser, so I usually, copy it into a local text editor, fix it and copy it back... but I really think you're addressing the wrong concern here.

I don't believe the problem is that it's hard to get right. I think the problem is that many people simply don't care. There are loads of posts which surely a user can't think are properly formatted - but either they don't see the preview, or they don't respect the people who are going to read their posts enough to consider it worth their time fixing it.

Having a separate external app isn't going to address that issue at all.

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    Yes Great, you got me right but if you use local editor apart from this Markdown editor how do you preview it?
    – Furqan Safdar
    Nov 8, 2012 at 7:20
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    @FSX: Dude he is Jon Skeet :)
    – Himanshu
    Nov 8, 2012 at 7:22
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    @FSX: I don't preview it in the editor - it's typically just for replacing tabs with spaces, or other "batch" operations. I then copy and paste it back into the browser, and preview it there.
    – Jon Skeet
    Nov 8, 2012 at 7:24

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