My thought on custom Astro components is that they provide a flexible format that can be converted into MD, HTML, JSON and other formats.
If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
121–130 of 282 posts
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like Commonmark but I wish it would have been more opinionated. They chose to allow two ways to do everything[0]. Making * always be used for bold and _ always for italicizing is so much clearer, and some Markdown flavors (notably WhatsApp) do this. So you only have to do *haha* or _haha_, which also makes italic-bold more _*intuitive*_. Similarly they should have gone with one style of headings, probably with #. T…
If you want strictness, use a linter or a pretty-printer that follows your preferred style. Adopting an opinionated parser means you can't lint or pretty-print input from those with different opinions (I do not like underscores for emphasis), and thus somewhat goes against the goals of TFA here: > Markdown files are essentially plaintext with some extra syntax for common elements like sections, bullet points, and lin…
I would just like to see Obsidian adopt MDX. I feel like there is a whole class of interactivity that could be easily implemented that way.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this sarcasm? or are we coming back full circle unintentionally?
It's not sarcasm. HTML is and always has been a decent format for hand-authoring documents. It's not as nice to use as markdown, but it does support more advanced use cases like coloured text. And if you want an "archival" format that will stand the test of time it's pretty good (so long as your text encoding is readable, HTML will be).
I agree with you, but I will say that Markdown (or at least, all the major "standards" for it) support interleaving HTML both inline and at the block level. Unless you are writing a very bombastic document or want to avoid a rendering step, I'd argue that you'd be best served by just writing CommonMark with embedded HTML.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#124I love markdown and use it for all my notes, however it really needs a native way to underline. I have been converting some older books and lectures to markdown and underline is used all the time. If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears.
> converting some older books and lectures...If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears. I don't know if this helps you, but you said "older": in the 20th century world of typewriters--which had no italics--underlining was used as a substitute for italics. Transforming underlines to italics or going the other way was considered normal. You wouldn't use both in the same document.
There's notional underlining, which in typewritten documents is effectively the equivalent of italic, and there is typographical underlining, where "underline" means "there is a line under this element and/or text".
Both matter, and although Markdown flavours handle the notional case well, they fall down at this (and several other) typographical capabilities. Expressing text in a particular colour (or greyshade) is another example. It's possible to achieve this in practice through embedded HTML and/or CSS tags, or through augmented Markdown variants (Pandoc's Markdown can achieve some things CommonMark or DaringFireball Markdown cannot).
Ultimately though I find I need to switch to a more capable and consistent text-layout engine, usually LaTeX in my case.
Though for even quite large and modestly complex works, Markdown is either sufficient entirely or is useful in getting the work off the ground before switching to a more powerful option.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#125I love markdown and use it for all my notes, however it really needs a native way to underline. I have been converting some older books and lectures to markdown and underline is used all the time. If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears.
The solution are HTML tags like
Markdown is often, and was originally intended for, HTML generation. But that's not the only target which can be achieved, particularly with such tools as Pandoc, a document format interchange Swiss Army knife.
Relying on format-specific tags imposes stronger constraints on endpoints and/or increases complexity of your document build process.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#126The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…
I don’t quite follow the first bullet point. If you are doing public speaking, your client is rendering the slides, right? Won’t you be the one interpreting “accentuate?” (So you can make it fit whatever convention you want).
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#127The only drawback of Markdown is images. GitHub-flavored Markdown is so popular because you can really easy inline them. You don't have to worry about storing them, linking them correctly, and you can even paste to the Markdown field. There is no elegant solution like this in actual Markdown.
I would add tables to that. Obsidian has some nice extensions to make working with tables easier, but it always feels janky.
Markdown is also missing:
- Diagrams
- Math
- Any custom blocks - like Figures, algorithms, image boxes, etc
- Numbered chapters / sections (Eg Chapter 1, Appendix A, etc).
- Semantic references
For readmes, thats fine I guess. But I miss all those features when I'm writing proper blog posts, articles and documentation.
There are various hacky workarounds. But as soon as you start using bespoke markdown extensions, you're locked out of 95% of the markdown tooling out there. And everything feels so janky.
I'm looking forward to Typst's HTML output getting more mature. Typst is the only typesetting tool I've ever used that is both enjoyable to use and powerful enough for the kind of documents I want to write. It manages that by being a full on programming language. You can define variables and write custom functions for reused blocks. And there is an ecosystem of 3rd party typst packages. For a paper I wrote recently, my benchmarking tool spat the results into a JSON file. My document loaded that JSON data directly, and used the benchmarking results to populate charts and tables in the paper. It was crazy cool.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#128The killer app for markdown would be a collaborative editor that displays the raw markdown and formatted markdown side-by-side and makes both sides editable. Tech people can use `#` and `*` on one side for formatting, product people can use normal text-editor buttons like "header1", "italics", etc.
I think this feature is already in qownnotes.
Surprised , nobody mentioned qownnotes
Edit: I was wondering how to enable this mode because it wasn't in my qownnotes ,Here's how I found it , go to the help section , click find action , and search preview and click on show note preview panel.
Now the caveat is that if you want to see it blitted , you have to save the file once to see it automatically show in the other side. Maybe this can also be definitely automated / I feel like there was some feature that did that for that as well or atleast its very non trivial.
Edit 2 : okay so I just realized that qownnotes also ships with autosave feature which saves and thus also shows what you type in reader mode in like a 0.5 second delay. And I think there is also a way to decrease / increase the autosave part as well
Dude , I didn't realize it , but qownnotes is so good!
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#129Indeed, I also realized that bookmarks are worthless on the long run. When choosing a note taking / knowledge management app, the main decision point was if it has a Firefox extension that can capture a web page into markdown and automatically save into my notes.
I used to use Joplin, lately switched to Obsidian. Both offer this functionality.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#130The underlying purpose of org-mode is to manage this issue (the text part). It doesn't solve it, instead it is a tool for managing the steadily increasing archive organizational complexity within an ever evolving timeline. You reconfigure your archive's implicit schema well now you're in a world of heavy editing. That's life. If you don't have a solid backup strategy, you are going to lose stuff. That's also life. Bi…
Yeah, org-mode and by extension Emacs really help in this regard. Now that Emacs has been ported to Android I expect its usefulness to only increase.
Looking back I can't believe I considered just bookmarking a link enough to save it long-term. Sure, I lost a lot of cruft but there were some gems that in retrospect I'd have liked to still reference or look at today. Eh, hindsight is 20/20 as the saying goes.