I have a project hosted on GitHub. For this I have written my README using the Markdown syntax in order to have it nicely formatted on GitHub.
As my project is in Py
The PyPI Warehouse now supports rendering Markdown as well! You just need to update your package configuration and add the long_description_content_type='text/markdown' to it. e.g.:
setup(
name='an_example_package',
# other arguments omitted
long_description=long_description,
long_description_content_type='text/markdown'
)
Therefore, there is no need to keep the README in two formats any longer.
You can find more information about it in the documentation.
The Markup library used by GitHub supports reStructuredText. This means you can write a README.rst file.
They even support syntax specific color highlighting using the code and code-block directives (Example)