Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Markdown is holding you back

newsletter.bphogan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 194 posts

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#121

Post by getnormality »

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…

Wow, I've never heard of DITA, so I was totally unprepared for how funny this was going to be.

"Markdown is not great for writing complex documentation. Why not use XML instead?"

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#124

Post by zelphirkalt »

The problem with reStructuredText at least is, that there seems to be only one canonical parser, that defines the format. Markup formats in my opinion need to be defined in terms of a proper grammar, so that we can easily adapt that grammar in any programming language to build a parser and have support for that format in another language. The Org format in Emacs also suffered from this, but now there is an effort to make a grammar for it, I believe.

That said, I have used reStructuredText for writing a technical master thesis, and for that it worked wonderfully. If you buy into the ecosystem or use Pandoc to convert to LaTeX/TeX, and build a PDF or whatever you need, it will work well. But if you want to use it as a basis for HTML pages from other languages, which don't have a parser for reStructuredText, then you are in for trouble.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#125

Post by eigenspace »

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?

Absolutely not, no. At least not any more than LaTeX is a cloud based solution with monthly fees (Overleaf)

The language, ecosystem, and compiler are FOSS. There is a cloud editor / collaboration platform that is paid, but nothing about the language requires that you use it (I use it almost exclusively through emacs)

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#126

Post by douglee650 »

You lost me at, "XML is not that bad if you are already doing ". Verbosity is insane, attribute vs element freedom induces crowd madness. But I do love the data-visiting parts, why can't they somehow get that into Markdown.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#127

Post by ashton314 »

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.

I watched Typst from afar for many years. I finally took it out for a spin about a month ago after version 0.14 dropped.

In less than an hour I reproduced my résumé—complete with fancy functions to typeset employment entries on a grid system. In under 24 hours I was tinkering with the Typst source code.

Typst is amazing. Syntax is clean and consistent. The compiler is so so fast. Docs are excellent. And it is very close to TeX when it comes to typesetting quality. There are a few tiny rough edges that any \usepackage{microtype} enjoyer will miss, but stuff is improving rapidly.

(Also, XKCD disclaimer: this was not an LLM—I just use em-dashes a lot because TeX made them easy to type and I got used to having them.)

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#128

Post by rurban »

Not at all. I use to maintain myriad of packages with restructured text, asciidoc, XML, perl pod and tex, but markdown all supercede it.

I could easily represent the long word spec for the DWG format in markdown with gh tables, rendering it to pdf, and it's even better than the original word. Just to represent our diffs.

I could easily produce C++ technical reports in markdown, rendering to pdf and HTML, which was perfect.

The rST docs are much easier to maintain in markdown than in rST.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#129

Post by KronisLV »

I'd rather use Markdown for writing and even user submitted content whenever possible instead of gag HTML or some other overcomplicated markup language. Sure, there's various different flavors of Markdown, but on average it's better than overcomplicated attribute ridden XML or even XSS prone HTML (where nobody even knows what section is and everything ends up being a div).

Just give me a good enough baseline, that's it. Markdown is close enough to that for now. I don't need that much semantic meaning in the text. Something like mdbook (https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook) is more than enough for my needs, compared to shipping docs in once again, gag DOCX files and PDFs.

Good that there are solutions for more advanced use cases, though, but be careful with that complexity where you don't need it.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#130

Post by raron »

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.

At a quick glance Typst seems to be very limited compared to LaTeX, especially for more unusual languages.
Post reply on HN