11–20 of 52 posts
I have also moved to markdown for nearly everything, using pandoc much of the time for output to HTML or PDF. It handles a few things (like citations) a bit better than multi-markdown, although I find multi-markdown tables to be more convenient.
My only problem is that I have no way to do easy footnoting. I had to add my own special HTML code at the bottom of the page, manually verify the link, and so on. Too much work.
Without even delving into Sphinx's extensions.
The only quibble I have with Markdown is that it shows its web-oriented origins by making it difficult to insert page breaks. That's largely the reason I still use LaTeX for a lot of things. Other than that, though, I fully agree with the author. Plain text is great because 1) it'll always be readable and 2) it forces you to focus on the writing first and the formatting second.
I'm not sure it's got to do with web-orientation, reStructuredText has targetted a number of builders from the start, yet does not have a native pagebreak directive (you either need to use an extension, or use raw passthrough to the latex builder)
If you like markdown you will LOVE using pandoc. I can't stress how wonderful things have been since I moved to pandoc. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Of course doing this bypasses the possibility of easily converting to HTML, but I've started many research papers writing in Markdown, which has less, let's say, "markup overhead" than LaTeX, previewing the results using pandoc's markdown2pdf utility. Then later when I'm ready to use the proper article template it's an easy step to convert to tex and insert it in the template. It's a nice way to initially not worry about formatting while writing the draft, but pandoc's TeX transparency allows to you insert figures and math-mode markup and still keep the rest of the document in markdown, so it's brilliant.
Also with a little regex script to change "section" into "slide" it's trivial to use markdown and pandoc for generating Beamer presentations, which is way nicer than writing them directly in tex, because of all the enumeration/itemize sections.
If you like markdown you will LOVE using pandoc. I can't stress how wonderful things have been since I moved to pandoc. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
My favorite thing about Pandoc is its LaTeX transparency. You can just throw some TeX in there and it will pass it through. Of course doing this bypasses the possibility of easily converting to HTML, but I've started many research papers writing in Markdown, which has less, let's say, "markup overhead" than LaTeX, previewing the results using pandoc's markdown2pdf utility. Then later when I'm ready to use the proper…
I like markdown. I dislike the use of brackets () to delimit links. I would have preferred angle brackets for links. Brackets are reserved delimiters in RFC3986 (etc) whereas angle brackets are recommended for delimiting URIs.
Markdown and Restructured Text are pretty nice. One Markdown annoyance is having to use two spaces at the end of a line to indicate a line break. In some text editors, you can't see the spaces at the end of the line so when you visually scan your Markdown you don't see the line breaks.
Markdown's default behavior of disregarding line breaks has two benefits: (1) you can keep your lines short without breaking paragraphs apart, and (2) putting each sentence (or long clause) in its own line plays very nicely with version control systems.