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The Markdownload browser extension is super useful for saving webpages as Markdown: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdownload/
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Isn't the point of Markdown that you don't need to 'see what you are generating', you can just read it? I write Markdown every day, but I do it in a plaintext editor (with syntax highlighting). I have a keyboard shortcut to view a preview in my browser, but I don't see a great need to be viewing that preview all the time.
I think the point of Markdown is to signal that you're someone who uses things like Markdown.
Hmmm. I see the use in this... For me, everything swirls in an enjoyable vortex towards org-mode. - Literate Programming, tangle/weave - Export to DocX, PDF, HTML - Org-Roam - Time Management. Several things mentioned above are day to day. I think spectacular things are often made up of collections of useful everyday things.
Org mode is great for plain text info storage. Just difficult to use if you havent joined the church of emacs
Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it. I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year. Now that disks are…
I had a private mailing list for 15 years and had emails squirreled away across several hard drives. I archived them all to my Mac, under a directory under /, and tossed the disks. Was too broke to have another disk for backups.
Then Apple decided in a upgrade to trash everything not-Apple under /. Archives gone. No warning. Really amateur move by them. Grrr.
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versus markdown it is ungreppable with all the escape codes/entities, then you have to use special tooling for search.
Avoid character entities—store your HTML files as UTF-8 and just embed everything.
covers most of thatI'm not surprised this post opens with a link to /r/DataHoarder. Hot take ... I understand the sentiment that you can't trust content on the web to be there forever, but there is also the other side of the argument which is: compulsively saving data is a waste of time and it introduces a cognitive overhead that you'd be better off without.
Why not Asciidoc instead of Markdown?
AsciiDoc's fine. So is reStructuredText. In some ways they're both a lot better than Markdown, even though I think MD's surely easier to learn and use. But the one clear advantage MD has over the others is its ubiquity. If a tool works with formatted text, it almost certainly supports MD. It might also support the others, but if so, that's just a bonus.
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> 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…
converting old typewritten notes, they may contain typewriter underlining, and it may represent italics. Markdown would be entirely sufficient to handle that.
there was no need to de-clarify my comment.
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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, y…
https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...
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Parsing Markdown is downright everything-hostile. Computers and humans alike.
Can you expand on why you think reading plain markdown is hostile? For the vast majority of my Obsidian vault, I could open the markdown file in Notepad and it would be just about as readable as it is in the editor. Of course, you lose the visual effect of the styling, but it's still perfectly legible.