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Markdown is holding you back

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101–110 of 194 posts

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#101

Post by euroderf »

starkparker wrote: post #51

By suggesting DITA as a valid alternative to Markdown, for any use, this has so completely lost the plot that it blows up whatever credibility Brian might have on the subject. It's disappointing, because I know of Brian and otherwise respect his work. Short of writing in raw Postscript, I can't think of a more completely different set of strengths, audiences, and applications. I had to get to a company with more than…

Ya don't often see this kind of vocal disappointment directed at DITA.

Can you provide more info about how exactly DITA+tooling fell on its face ?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#102

Post by autogn0me »

dardeaup wrote: post #18

This is a timely topic for me. I'm just beginning the writing of a technical book. I plan to target epub/mobi. My research thus far has pointed to markdown -> html -> epub/mobi. If you were going to write a technical ebook would you use markdown or an alternative?

Asciidoc

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#104

Post by tannhaeuser »

evandrofisico wrote: post #103

People keep reinventing LaTeX, but poorly. Most of the issues described have already been solved by it at least 20 years ago, especially the semantics part. The tooling is mature, well understood and supported on all operating systems.

As far as custom shortforms for fully tagged angle-bracket markup is concerned, people are reinventing SGML which can handle markdown and other custom syntaxes since 1986.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#105

Post by flohofwoe »

Eh, we had plenty of such structured document formats in the past. Markdown has won simply because it's much less hassle to write while still being readable without a specialized viewer. Markdown is exactly at the right sweetspot.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#106

Post by MrWB »

josephg wrote: post #75
tedggh wrote: post #58

Certainly not holding me back. I can go from crappy notes on a notepad to a polished and branded PDF release including TOC, tables, images and formulas, info/warning boxes, lists, code snippets with syntax highlighting, header/footer, etc in literally minutes. What else do you need?

What else? I want figures. I want linked references. I want custom styling for images, and for blocks of text (eg warnings, notes, etc). I want a TOC and numbered chapters and sections. Sometimes I want a bibliography. Or a table generated from data within a JSON file. You don't need this stuff for a readme file. But IMO markdown isn't powerful enough for blog posts, documentation or longer form content.

Have you looked at Quarto?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#107

Post by IgorPartola »

I am surprised TeX [1] and LaTeX (pronounced tech and lay-tech) are not mentioned in this post. When I was a physics undergrad it was required that we wrote our senior thesis in it as well as any studies we meant to publish. Interestingly, my lab worked closely with a lab from the chemistry department and apparently their standard was MS Word docs. I was given to understand that this setup was fairly universal for both disciplines.

Latex seemed arcane coming from the background of HTML but it was pretty easy to pick up and is human readable.

Aside from the markup language itself, what is cool about TeX is its versioning. Since the idea is that at some point it does meet all of its goals it is essentially approximating its own perfect form. As a result as it gets closer to that goal its version approaches the value of Pi [2]. The current version is 3.141592653.

Tex has been around for 47 years so if you are looking for stability, look no further.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

[2] https://www.preethamrn.com/posts/piver

P.S.: manpage format is also quite simple to learn and it is always a really good addition to any CLI tool.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#108

Post by zdc1 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

The main point of Markdown is that it has a very important feature that other languages don't have: it's supported in a lot of places. Most of the alternatives mentioned in this thread or in the article are things that require custom tools, that can't be used in most of the places that currently do support markdown. It's common in a lot of places. Even Google Docs has a well hidden feature that allows you to paste ma…

Yeah, I don't see the point of this article: Markdown has already won.

I have some clients where I will send docs in MS Word/PDF format, but that kind of proves the point: the recipient sets the format. They may not explicitly say anything, but I'm not going to send something if there's a risk of receiving a "how do I open this?"

Also, code blocks are the worst example of it's limitations: just use backticks. Sometimes I want to have a big table or diagram and find that Markdown (/Obsidian) doesn't quite scratch my itch, but then there's always HTML...

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#109

Post by eigenspace »

IgorPartola wrote: post #107

I am surprised TeX [1] and LaTeX (pronounced tech and lay-tech) are not mentioned in this post. When I was a physics undergrad it was required that we wrote our senior thesis in it as well as any studies we meant to publish. Interestingly, my lab worked closely with a lab from the chemistry department and apparently their standard was MS Word docs. I was given to understand that this setup was fairly universal for bo…

Some someone who learned document editing and drafting through LaTeX in my undergrad, I gotta say I'm not sure I'd recommend it anymore to people looking for a new tool.

To me, Typst is the 'weirdly missing' option here. I really see it as the most promising successor to LaTeX, which is not something I say lightly given that I spent years scoffing at the idea of Typst ever displacing LaTeX in my life.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#110

Post by eigenspace »

undeveloper wrote: post #15
jimmar wrote: post #5

Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great. For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me. But in the end, no markup language will make you write bette…

typst looks interesting -- but how are you writing it? from what I looked at, it looks like theres an official web editor and a vscode plugin with limited support. this feels pretty limited, as someone who came in expecting something like obsidian.

You can write Typst in any editor you like, and the Typst compiler is FOSS available.

I write Typst code from emacs personally

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