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Markdown is holding you back

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Re: Markdown is holding you back

#111

Post by Analemma_ »

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…

Getting people to write documentation is already an uphill battle, the reality is it needs to be made as frictionless as possible or they won’t do it. IMO this rules out (La)TeX entirely: it’s just too much work that nobody wants to deal with.

I also have a philosophical issue with writing documentation in TeX: TeX is a typesetting program, i.e. it’s a presentation format meant to look a certain way on a page, while documentation should be agnostic to appearance as much as possible. But that’s more a personal objection.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#112

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

I was the only student who did the thesis in MS Word because why the fuck not. Of course I had to use a LaTeX font, and there was a bug with PDF export, but other than that, it was fine.

Long ago I've read a study somewhere that people using LaTeX take more time and effort to accomplish same tasks compared to MS Word, but they are more happy about the process. Seems to match my impression that LaTeX is "by tinkerers, for tinkerers".

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#113

Post by gyomu »

eigenspace wrote: post #109
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.

Typst seems to be a cloud based solution with monthly fees? How’s that even relevant to the discussion of open source, free, local tools like latex/markdown?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#114

Post by Analemma_ »

gyomu wrote: post #113
eigenspace wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Typst seems to be a cloud based solution with monthly fees? How’s that even relevant to the discussion of open source, free, local tools like latex/markdown?

No, Typst the typesetting software is FOSS (Apache license), as is a bunch of the surrounding ecosystem (e.g. the LSP for editor support). The people making it also ofter paid SASS stuff for features enterprises like, but there is no need to use them.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#115

Post by blackhaj7 »

My biggest problem with Markdown is that I hate writing in it. I find messing around with the syntax interrupts my flow.

Are others writing raw markdown/mdx or is there a CMS/Vscode plugin I should be using? (I have a few plugins already but find the writing experience pretty rubbish still)

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#116

Post by rssoconnor »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #104
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.

I've been meaning to see how close I can come to Markdown syntax using SGML's SHORTREF and perhaps architectural forms.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#117

Post by thoroughburro »

gyomu wrote: post #113
eigenspace wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Typst seems to be a cloud based solution with monthly fees? How’s that even relevant to the discussion of open source, free, local tools like latex/markdown?

> Typst seems to be a cloud based solution with monthly fees?

In the exact same way that git is: it isn’t, but one easy way to use it is.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#118

Post by immibis »

flohofwoe wrote: post #105

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.

As long as your unstructured hassle-free writing just happens to be in the same format accepted by the viewer.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#119

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

While it is true, that Markdown is available in more places, it is also true, that it as well "requires custom tools". Just that those tools already got put in place by people developing things. There is no technical reason keeping developers from supporting other languages as well. It's more of a social issue, that they don't.

I also doubt, that Markdown will be able to be extended with the same "ease" HTML has been extended. Markdown does not have a systematic syntax like HTML does. It is not parser and machine friendly. It may be human friendly, but that doesn't make it easy to extend. In HTML on the other hand, one could, theoretically, just come up with a new tag name and introduce a new tag. Mind, we are talking about using both formats for writing a document. Of course Markdown doesn't have the same burden of already being the workhorse of the web and being directly interpreted by browser rendering engines. That however is an aspect that resides outside of the actual format considerations.

We already got tons of Markdown dialects and most of them don't gain particularly much traction, because they are only supported in niche tools. The only one of them that could be considered standard is maybe common mark, with its extensive test suite. Specialized ones like Pandoc Markdown for writing papers exist, but will most likely never leave their niche.

What I could imagine is, that maybe the changes from dialect to dialect could be outsourced into "extensions" and then one would need to pick "syntax conflict free" extensions. But since the format itself is kind of ad-hoc, and not systematic like HTML with its tags, it seems also unlikely, that such an extension system would work well.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#120

Post by bccdee »

hysan wrote: post #61
vorpalhex wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most markdown engines allow short tags to stand in for html, so for frequent features you can just use a short tag. Alternatively you can extend markdown. I wrote a simple text based game engine that was markdown based but I needed some arbitrary additions appropriate for a game.. so I just added a few elements.

The author addresses this too. Once you start down this path, you go down the road of non-standardization which means losing portability, etc. I don’t see how this is a point against the author?

None of the author's other suggestions are portable either. So what if pandoc markdown is only understood by pandoc's tooling? DocBook is only understood by DocBook tooling. The difference is that pandoc markdown is already 95% similar to every other flavour of markdown, so migrating to a new system (if necessary) would be relatively simple. Also, the difference is that XML is a pain to write and I'm not sure semantic tags matter all that much.
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