GitHub is doubling down on Markdown
https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil...
https://github.blog/changelog/2022-01-21-allow-to-upload-svg...
Long live Markdown !!
Thoughts on Markdown
51–60 of 167 posts
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense. On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspec…
> "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand" I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.
Most journals I read offer both reflowable HTML and PDF. I don't know anybody who prefers the former.
A PDF (and the paper copy it generates) is more convenient for markup, and for memory. I can look at papers I read decades ago, and know where to go to find things, because of what I might call positional memory. Somehow, my brain has information such as "The key Figure is at top of third page" or "that equation I think is wrong is at the bottom of the second-last page". I'm not alone in this. I suppose it's just how brains work (e.g. people who do memory tricks "store" the information in an imagined space).
When I look at reflowed text, I just get lost. I can't make notes that "stick" with the text if I enlarge the font. And memories don't form in the same way as for PDF/paper.
I suppose this might be field-dependent. I think in some fields the key point of a paper is a single sentence, which could be identified easily in reflowing text and then copied into a separate file. I don't read papers like that, though. That's why, in my line of work, PDF/paper is superior to reflowable text.
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#53We have a binary and universal format for plain text (utf8) that is extended all the time with additional emojis. But it seems almost unimaginable that we ever get a binary text format that also allows simple semantic markup, like emphasis, tables, hyperlinks, amounts, dates, and phone numbers.
It's 2022, and really, we should be able to copy a paragraph from an email with a table in it into a chat app and have it just work. HTML is way too complex to use as data communication format between apps (vulnerabilities; every app allows a different subset). Markdown is made for humans to read/write, when what we need is a simple unambiguous binary format that is easy to parse.
We can have compound emojis where a polar bear is a bear + a snowflake joined by a zero-width joiner. But a datetime or number in text is too much to ask?
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#54The discussion reminds me a little of the one around LaTeX in the scientific community. Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks in its own specific and manifold ways (as does LibreOffice). HTML is still not nice to read, too much boilerplate tags required. Markdown source however is mostly well-readable in a p…
> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. For the kind of text that you'd use Markdown for, i.e. text that is mostly just text and not math heavy, LaTeX should be almost as readable as Markdown. For example, \section{Introduction} is almost as readable as ## Introduction
Yes, almost ;)
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks The Lyx editor solves both these problems for me. I'd probably be using LaTeX a lot less if I hadn't found Lyx (that quote about fingernail clippings in oatmeal doesn't apply to Lisp IMO, but certainly does to LaTeX).
I used Lyx back in university to transcribe the math lectures. It was good enough that the professor later asked me if I can send him the PDFs and source files ;)
Lyx is great for that exact purpose! I used it too as an undergrad. But it doesn't offer the full flexibility and toolset available in LaTeX, which limits its use for more complex documents.
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#56>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…
> We've had a variety of markup formats including HTML, XML, etc. which are relatively a pain to read or write. Right, but Markdown relies on HTML (or whatever other markup it is pre-procesing) for anything difficult. I like Markdown[0] but surely our job as technologists is to find better solutions than a system that requires you to escape asterisks in certain situations, or rely on a preview pane to work out what i…
I would argue that it may be a case of "less is more". Yes Markdown is limited, but the limits make the language trivial to learn, modify and understand. It also means that the format can be trivially displayed almost anywhere and converted to all sorts of other formats.
There will always be a tradeoff between simplicity and the feature set, I find that for the vast majority of my use cases Markdown is simply good enough.
When I read markdown docs on github I usually get a pleasant sense of familiarity, everybody tends to gravitate towards the same basic layout because that's what Markdown does. That's a feature IMO, it means that you can focus on the content, not waste time parsing the quirky layout.
Monthly reminder that Gopher should've won btw.
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using Markdown with pandoc and pandoc-crossref is basically perfect as a substitute of LaTeX. It allows in-line and standalone LaTeX, and citations with crossref.
In my experience this has zero advantage over LaTeX since converting your markdown to formats other than LaTeX will be just as hard as converting from a LaTeX source. It's even harder because you have to deal with an eclectic mix of LaTeX and markdown, and various errors and restrictions in pandoc.
The problems in converting LaTeX usually come from third-party packages. When only a restricted set of packages is allowed then it is quite straightforward. This is the reason many publishers require latex, even if they don't use LaTeX internally (which is often the case).
They convert LaTeX to the XML dialect that their in-house layout system understands.
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not writing or reading LaTeX, properly written LaTeX is very readable. It's easy to maintain and understand, and Bibtex for bibliographies works fine once you've gotten used to it. The problems start once you have to convert this to MS Word, which is essentially impossible with any advanced LaTeX document which will invariably contain complex formulas and also include hacks and adjustments in the pream…
You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`? After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal become…
> On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not.
Do you know if they used LaTeX for the layout internally, or if they used some proprietary system that was fed the LaTeX source?
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#59We have a binary and universal format for plain text (utf8) that is extended all the time with additional emojis. But it seems almost unimaginable that we ever get a binary text format that also allows simple semantic markup, like emphasis, tables, hyperlinks, amounts, dates, and phone numbers. It's 2022, and really, we should be able to copy a paragraph from an email with a table in it into a chat app and have it ju…
Well, that really seems to be a very hard problem to me.
Tables for instance get quite complex pretty fast -- joined cells, text alignment, etc.
As for a format which -- not plain text, though -- that handles this is rich text. It's been around for quite some time.
IMHO the problem is in the difference between presentation and data. One group of consumers want the "data" and parse it, the other group of consumers want to basically have it "look the same in this app as in the other app, and don't make my think."
Re: Thoughts on Markdown
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense. On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspec…
> "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand" I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.
> I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.
YES!
It's 2022 and in spite of the often-praised superiority of LaTeX, we are still getting paginated PDFs on ArXiv, instead of responsive text that reflows on different screen sizes. PDFs were great to read when I was still printing papers. For reading on screen they are quite inconvenient.
Many publishers have come around in the last decade and offer HTML versions of full papers (after you get through the paywall).