MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown • Hacker News Board

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#121

Post by LeonB » Sun, Jul 02, 2023, 6:40 AM UTC

wumms wrote: post #38

LeonB wrote: post #25

I used to use gitbook to generate til.secretGeek.net but it got slower and slower over time, would take 45 mins to build the site… and then the parts I was using were either deprecated or made “premium” - something happened. The “enshittification” set in, basically. If there’s some nice free thing you use that’s too good to be true… wait a few years it will go to muck. I bit the bullet and wrote my own very minimal s…

> spruik spruik - in British English (ˈspruːɪkˈ) [Australian archaic, slang]: to speak in public (used esp of a showman or salesman) - in American English (ˈspruːkˈ) [Australian slang]: to make or give a speech, esp. extensively or elaborately; spiel; orate https://www.collinsdictionary.com/jp/dictionary/english/spru...

I’m now very self conscious of using the word “spruik” (a feature of Australian culture is that we look down on Australian culture… this is called our “cultural-cringe”) - and just saw “spruik” used in a headline in an Australian news story, which shows it is still a very current word here.

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#122

Post by still_grokking » Sun, Jul 02, 2023, 10:14 AM UTC

BenFeldman1930 wrote: post #112

still_grokking wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else besides EMACS supports .org files? Form the alternatives I've seen so far it looks best. But EMACS? (I'm on Linux, but never liked EMACS or Vi(m)). The second best looking alternative seems AsciiDoc. It has some more tooling as I see it. But really like the .org syntax best so far. So any recommendations for tooling?

AsciiDoc still has no footnotes, but only endnotes. Therefore not really useful for writing non-fiction books. As org-mode files are only text files, you can use any editor you like. If you want all the goodies (agenda, TODOs etc), you have to use Emacs, yes.

> AsciiDoc still has no footnotes, but only endnotes.

Does Markdown have footnotes or endnotes? No?

People are still misusing it for everything! Especially for technical writing, which is just nuts.

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#123

Post by qwerty456127 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:06 AM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #95

qwerty456127 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then go for plain text. All those headings and asterisks are a distraction anyway. Years ago, many e-books used to be distributed in plain text in fact. Markdown is more semantic. E.g. it gives you a ToC (a very important feature of a good book, and it has to be semantic markup-based when you decouple the text from the view by omitting explicit pagination) for free.

HTML is also semantic. It also has a good standard, its support is omnipresent, is extensible, actually supports tables etc.

Isn't Markdown meant to be lightweight HTML with shortcuts to declutter it visually? Afaik it even is considered officially correct to use HTML tags in it when necessary.