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Why Is Markdown Popular?

russellbeattie.com

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#171

Post by manicdee »

Avshalom wrote: post #100
virtualritz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Markdown will never get beyond developers. My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'. We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option. I also used git to manage changes. This was 2009. He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me…

>>My partner is writing her PhD thesis [...] in Markdown. Is she though? Markdown doesn't even have image captions or like support for citations.

[something interesting][JoBloggs1996]

[JoBloggs1996]: ISBN:12356789 “Whatever you want to be the title text of the link here”

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#172

Post by mcluck »

vanderZwan wrote: post #163
mcluck wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be some conflating going on here. As the author mentioned, the spec space is a scattered mess. For the same reason, all markdown to HTML compilers are following their own rules (unless they specifically call out the recommendations of one of the specs.) So if you are getting crappy HTML output, get (or write since it's so simple) a better compiler. Many markdown to HTML tools will let you apply templat…

So how would you determine where to put an article, section, header or footer tag with markdown, not counting using raw HTML in markdown??

Most of the tags you mentioned should only have a single one in the document, generally speaking, so insert them yourself as part of the template. You could make an argument for wanting to have different s which I figure could be built when you encounter a level 2 header or similar. If you want to create more complex documents, use HTML. Markdown isn't the right tool

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#173

Post by paultopia »

Currently finishing my third (full-length academic) book in markdown. Wrote the second book in markdown too. Wrote the first book in MS word. Never going back.

Here's the thing. Word is a buggy bloated piece of shit application with an incomprehensible and ever-changing UI that requires 20 mouse clicks hunting through badly labeled menus to do anything. Latex is far too complicated for prose that doesn't have equations all in it, and is also unsupported by publishers outside of the sciences. Alternative word processors (OpenOffice, Pages, the desiccated shell of WordPerfect) are either buggy, ugly, unmaintained, lack critical features, or all of the above.

So I just write in markdown in emacs. Markdown mode in emacs works very well, I have hardly any customizations on top. One file per chapter. References in zotero, insert citations in better bibtex. Compile it all in pandoc.

When I want to revise I just concatenate the files and compile it to PDF and read my own work there. When I want to submit to a publisher I just compile it to word. I have a makefile that handles all of that for me. Then I make a few tiny tweaks in the garbage program and submit.

This is the best workflow I've ever found for academic writing, because pandoc-enhanced markdown and better bibtex enhanced zotero give you everything you really need for academic writing (like control over reference formats), and nothing you don't need (endless nightmarish word bloat). And you can just store it all in a GitHub repo.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#174

Post by FinnKuhn »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #25

>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a…

>Markdown will never get beyond developers.

considering that the only option to format text in programs like discord is a "light" version of markdown I would say many younger folks have at least a basic understanding of how markdown works.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#175

Post by jiggawatts »

chrisweekly wrote: post #70
jiggawatts wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to the same conclusion years ago and made myself and "alternate" markdown-like format that superficially looks the same, but has a grammar compatible with parser generators like ANTLR. Took me about a week to produce something that could generate a nice document object model, and spit out HTML (or anything you please). The concept is powerful. The specific Markdown implementation however is too messy for prope…

"too messy for proper tooling" Obsidian and its many amazing plugins are powerful evidence to the contrary.

By tooling I don't mean Markdown tools. I mean the tools used to produce those tools.

Think compiler-compilers such as Yacc, Bison, or ANTLR.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#176

Post by omaranto »

WolfOliver wrote: post #50
mpweiher wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Of course it is. Because for plain text markdown you don't need a markdown-specific or even markdown-aware app. Any old plain text editor will do. Which is kind of the point.

then the critic of the article is valid again. Its just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

> It's just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

Try writing a table in Emacs Org Mode before you say that!

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#177

Post by Falkon1313 »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #137
Falkon1313 wrote: post #25

>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a…

> I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG

Ah, I see that now, Source Mode vs Live Preview. But either way you're not using a toolbar and mouse for basic formatting and it's not hiding invisible control codes from you as you edit like in a standard WYSIWYG editor. The sort of things that make Word documents so hard to edit.

Even in Live Preview mode, every character is visible when the cursor is in the area.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#178

Post by The_Colonel »

themadturk wrote: post #145
The_Colonel wrote: post #9

I like Markdown for self-contained one page documents with basic formatting - reddit comments, README.md etc. For anything more it's just inadequate.

I wrote a 98,000+ word novel in Markdown. Pandoc renders it perfectly to Word. The text included a title page, epigraphs in italic, headers of various levels for parts, chapters, scenes. All I had to do in Word was make sure my paragraph styles were set up the way I wanted (and that Pandoc knew what they were supposed to look like), then run a macro to get rid of the cr/lfs between paragraphs. I don't know if the nov…

What I had more in mind was e.g. linking between different documents, images, tables, footnotes etc. I guess most of these are possible (depending on your Markdown flavor), but largely very awkward.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#179

Post by russellbeattie »

Heh. Author here. Not sure how I missed this since I'm on HN daily. Must have come and gone quick! I had no idea. I haven't seen this much rabid hysteria aimed at something I've written for a while! Nice. Given that I practically live here, it's not unexpected, but still... Wow.
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