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If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

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Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#141

Post by labster »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #107
tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The 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…

RTF isn’t a better option than MD, plaintext is. We start with the premise that we are talking about plain text, as in plain text, texts. But pretty soon we are into colours, then maybe images and videos, and then what all not. But MD still is closest to plaintext because in most cases MD (or a similar scheme), even when not rendered, can be read easily in its plaintext formatting.

Honestly plaintext has a pretty bad record as a format, with all of the UTF-16, Latin-2, Shift JIS, and so on. I’d suggest paper, or for true archival storage, parchment and stone.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#142

Post by Helmut10001 »

jkingsman wrote: post #57
jon_richards wrote: post #36

The 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.

It's not collaborative, but this is what I love about Typora[0]. Click into a styled area and the styling becomes visible. Click out, and you just see the final styling. [0] https://typora.io/

Typora is really a gem in the Markdown universe.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#143

Post by Helmut10001 »

dtkav wrote: post #113
jon_richards wrote: post #36

The 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.

Here's a comparison chart of collaboration/teamwork plugins in Obsidian. https://system3.md/observatory/categories/collaboration-team... Peerdraft, Relay, and Screen Garden are all based on CRDTs, and Obsidian is also currently working on native collaboration. (disclaimer: I work on Relay)

Unfortunately, all of these are not self-hostable. I wish there was something like Nextcloud for Markdown Collaboration.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#144

Post by denzil »

smm11 wrote: post #87

WTF? text.txt Readable in everything, since forever.

I wish. If you live in any country that uses more than ASCII, then certainly not since forever. I mean, just for my language there were 7 different encodings (according to Wikipedia, possibly more) before Unicode era. When you want to read these it's solvable problem, but still it is extra work to deal with it. Now that we have UTF-8 as de-facto standard, it is much better, but there are still problems. Like when you use Japanese and it gets displayed as Chinese (same characters are different glyphs depending on language).

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#145

Post by myaccountonhn »

Evidlo wrote: post #17

Just a note that the most common Markdown flavor (Commonmark) doesn't actually support frontmatter. The author is using presumably Obisidian-flavored Markdown (which is a mixture of Commonmark, GH-flavored Markdown, and Latex). For file-tagging, I would consider TMSU [0] instead of writing bespoke tools. (ideally we would just use xattrs, but the world isn't ready for that) [0]: https://tmsu.org/

Thanks for sharing tmsu, I had never seen that before.

Though I wonder what benefits it has over just plain symlinks?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#146

Post by dodorz »

huqedato wrote: post #31

My pain is that I couldn't find a decent md viewer for Windows: free, fast, simple, no distractions. Imagine notepad. I have to open my md files with VSCode or Notepad++ (nasty view).

Try this one: Markdown Viewer. Other than the larger size that comes with being based on Electron, it's all quite good. https://github.com/c3er/mdview

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#147

Post by dtkav »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #143
dtkav wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a comparison chart of collaboration/teamwork plugins in Obsidian. https://system3.md/observatory/categories/collaboration-team... Peerdraft, Relay, and Screen Garden are all based on CRDTs, and Obsidian is also currently working on native collaboration. (disclaimer: I work on Relay)

Unfortunately, all of these are not self-hostable. I wish there was something like Nextcloud for Markdown Collaboration.

Relay now supports self hosting the collaboration server. It works with tailscale out of the box.

We still have a centralized service for authentication and authorization, but if you self host it is impossible for us to access your files.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#148

Post by 1propionyl »

labster wrote: post #141
crossroadsguy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTF isn’t a better option than MD, plaintext is. We start with the premise that we are talking about plain text, as in plain text, texts. But pretty soon we are into colours, then maybe images and videos, and then what all not. But MD still is closest to plaintext because in most cases MD (or a similar scheme), even when not rendered, can be read easily in its plaintext formatting.

Honestly plaintext has a pretty bad record as a format, with all of the UTF-16, Latin-2, Shift JIS, and so on. I’d suggest paper, or for true archival storage, parchment and stone.

Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap.

I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral transmission...

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#149

Post by jajko »

tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The 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…

The part about seeing the results immediately can be done easily ie via plugins in text editors like Notepad++. You have left pane with markdown text and right pane with rendered result, updated after each keystroke.

I've tried 2 different plugins, they are a bit finnicky re formatting (I do a lot of bullet points in my various todo lists and a small thing can break whole block of them) and output looks a bit different, but I still prefer them.

Heck, I often prefer reading markdown itself these days just for myself since the structure is already there and visible, I've learned to see those formatting characters as already sort of rendered formatting so not even looking into rendered pane that much.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#150

Post by bflesch »

tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The 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…

Good point. I just noticed that RTF really looks a lot like LaTeX syntax - LaTeX was clearly inspired by it.
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