In additional to the suggestion of asciidoc below, there's also docbook (SGML based) - a good starting point may be Pod::DocBook. A MetaCPAN search for SGML is also a good starting point. Here is a pretty comprehensive list of mark up languages. SGML is the basis for some of them (e.g., docbook, linuxdoc), but certainly not all. I'd be remiss to not mention that quite a few things have been published using the old unix *roff family of text formatters.