If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

Alternatives for authoring PDFs include LaTeX or similar markup languages, or GUI-based tools.

For many works, Markdown is more than sufficient for producing book-length texts (I've done this numerous times myself, either authoring my own works or transcribing/modifying books for improved access/readability). Markdown's benefit is that it is extraordinarily lightweight, and removes overhead from the authoring process.

Even where one ultimately chooses to migrate from Markdown to some more capable authoring format, Markdown remains useful for creating the original rough form of the work. Complex elements (figures, formulae, tables, etc.) can be indicated and, after document conversion from, say Markdown to LaTeX, fleshed out in full.

With tools such as Pandoc (see my earlier comments on it), it's trivially possible to create multiple outputs (I usually refer to these as "endpoints") of a document. I've used Makefiles to drive this process, such that I write source in Markdown and generate partial or full HTML documents,[1] other LWMLs,[2] PDF, ePub, straight ASCII/UTF-8/Unicode text, word-processing formats, etc., as I want. The set of Markdown + Pandoc makes this trivial in ways that, say, LaTeX alone isn't entirely suited.[3]

It's of course possible to use another LWML as the source format. Markdown has its limitations, but is most widely known and implemented, and limitations workarounds are typically reasonable.

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Notes:

1. A partial HTML doc may be useful for dropping into a larger document, and doesn't require global HTML elements such as the , , tags, or others such as or in most cases.

2. Lightweight markup languages such as bbCode, AsciiDoc, RST, MediaWiki, OrgMode, etc., etc., see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>. Useful when inserting the document into systems based on these formats.

- [HackMD: Your Collaborative Markdown Workspace for Knowledge Sharing](https://hackmd.io/)

Markdown was never really about codifying anything existing. Sure, it took a lot of guidance from existing conventions, but it also invented quite a bit, ignored quite a bit, and compromised quite a bit because of wanting to mostly sit atop HTML.

The most notable deviation from custom is its link syntax, which is simply bad. Where any delimiter was necessary, the longstanding custom was to delimit with angle brackets; and Markdown did allow https://example.com/>, but its text-with-hyperlink syntax of [text](href) is highly confusing, leads to frequent errors, and makes the huge mistake of using as its delimiters characters that are valid in URLs. (In current spec terms, parentheses are in the set of URL code points https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-code-points>.) This has led to all sorts of trouble. My guess is that angle brackets weren’t used because of the potential for confusion with HTML tags, though there would have been no real parser ambiguity, and autolink syntax kinda messed that argument up anyway.

Then its image syntax of , that’s just plain nonsense.

I’d say that reStructuredText (from a little earlier) matched existing conventions slightly better than Markdown, in general. And it was much more sane, as a language, especially when you wanted to extend it.

> It’s meant to be human readable first and only incidentally convertible to actual markup.

If it were incidental, you wouldn’t use it—just go informal and write what suits you, it will be nicer.

No, the only reason for Markdown is so that you can write HTML with a nicer syntax. It’s not incidental at all. Sure, that syntax is intended for human-readability and -authoring, but it’s essential to Markdown that it is actual markup, poorly-defined though it be as a family of lightweight markup languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>.

> Plain text is the presentation format

Do you know how many README.md files there are on GitHub that are essentially HTML soup? It’s a bit sad, really. It doesn’t invalidate the intention of what you’re saying, but I would say that Markdown is noticeably less about plain text being the presentation format than it was twenty years ago.