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A Scholarly Markdown

scholarlymarkdown.com

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Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#71

Post by picks_at_nits »

timtylin wrote: post #54
lorddoig wrote: post #25

And for everything else, there's AsciiDoc.[0] For an extra five minutes learning you get a boatload (think container ship) more features[1] - it compiles to DocBook: a mature, actually standardised , highly structured format, and from that you get HTML, EPUB, PDF, slideshows, and man pages for free.[0] For math you get MathML, ASCIIMath, and LaTeX (along with a number of ways to render them.) It has a super nice synt…

I love AsciiBook. Everything but the name. If we ever get an amazing collaborative development tool like Github that has built-in AsciiBook rendering, this project would have been called "Scholarly AsciiBook (but we got Unicode support too I swear really)". Edit: I was wrong about Github not supporting AsciiDoc

In addition to supporting previews of AsciiDoc files, you’ll find that GitHub also does the “rendered prose diff” trick for commits and pull requests that include changes to AsciiDoc files.

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#72

Post by j2kun »

chriswarbo wrote: post #65
arnsholt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably never going to happen (for any Markdown-based project). As you probably know, TeX is a full programming language (albeit an odd one), which means that to compile (La)TeX to Markdown, Markdown needs to support all the features of TeX, which means that it has to be Turing-complete. Not to mention the fact that parsing TeX is kind of nuts too.

There's no need to convert all TeX back to markdown; the converter only needs to recognise the sub-set of TeX that it produces. If anyone edits the TeX to fall outside that sub-set, it's reasonable to just embed those parts verbatim in the resulting Markdown.

Exactly. And I have a very strong feeling that without the ability to collaborate implicitly (at least on the text/math mode part), no replacement for LaTeX will catch on in my community (mathematics).

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#73

Post by j2kun »

timtylin wrote: post #68
j2kun wrote: post #40

If you want me (as an academic) to use ScholarlyMarkdown, then you can't force my collaborators to use ScholarlyMarkdown as a consequence. There should be a nice ScholarlyMarkdown -> LaTeX cross compiler for starting simple documents in TeX and then sharing with collaborators (pick some obvious defaults or allow a config file to get fancy). But more importantly, if I am joining a project that already has a bunch of L…

I've actually been wondering if this is possible from a theoretical standpoint. I'm thinking you can use Pandoc's LaTeX to MD conversion mode, save changes to a copy, wdiff to get the total change set, then somehow convert that into a LaTeX patch. Whether you can guarantee that this won't break anything is going to be a really challenging problem, as my head is already swimming with edge-cases. I guess we'll know the…

In any case, my point is plain and simple: I collaborate in almost everything I do, and my collaborators are my primary concern when I choose a tool. If they use notepad and Dropbox, I need to make sure my tools don't conflict with that. There's no way in hell I would ask a collaborator to learn to use git or a new markup language just to work with me.

I'd love a tool that works with this philosophy, and I feel certain anything like ScholarlyMarkdown won't catch on in my field (theoretical computer science) without such tools.

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#74

Post by qznc »

rhythmvs wrote: post #16

John MacFarlane (Pandoc’s author) is heavily committed to the Common Mark standardization effort of Markdown (in fact he’s the principal designer of the Common Mark spec). Both Common Mark and Pandoc serve different purposes: the first is an initiative to counter fragmentation/balkanization of the Markdown ecosystem and in being so has to reckon with backward compatibility, consensus and adoption. The latter is a doc…

CommonMark should be mentioned on the ScholarlyMarkdown frontpage. I thought it was some competing project.

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#75

Post by lorddoig »

fiddlosopher wrote: post #70
lorddoig wrote: post #25

And for everything else, there's AsciiDoc.[0] For an extra five minutes learning you get a boatload (think container ship) more features[1] - it compiles to DocBook: a mature, actually standardised , highly structured format, and from that you get HTML, EPUB, PDF, slideshows, and man pages for free.[0] For math you get MathML, ASCIIMath, and LaTeX (along with a number of ways to render them.) It has a super nice synt…

AsciiDoc is a nice project, but I think that pandoc's variant of Markdown has a lot of advantages over AsciiDoc for academic writing. Let's just compare support for math and citations, for example. Pandoc's citation support is output-format independent: you can write the citations, specify a CSL stylesheet and bibliography, and you'll get the same output in every format pandoc supports. In AsciiDoc, as I understand i…

The CommonMark is definitely more readable, but Markdown is just so sparse by design that every time I tried to use it for anything more serious than e.g. a blog post I found myself banging my head against the wall, so it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make - and we're talking about languages whose purpose is to produce readable output, so while a readable source file is definitely a nice thing I think it's hard to make a case for valuing that over functionality. To title a paragraph in markdown you can choose from an or a , that's it, and it's so tightly coupled to HTML (it's more of an HTML generation format like HAML than a document format really) that if you need to do anything remotely complex you're forced to either inline the HTML or bind yourself forever to external tools - in which case the goal of universal readability is defeated anyway.

Markdown's syntax constrains how much it can ever do, whereas AsciiDoc is designed to be extensible, providing macros at the "language" level and underneath that there's the whole DocBook toolchain: it seems to me that the clever move is leverage all this, rather than create yet-another-Markdown (and it's not like the syntax tradeoff is at all dramatic.) I think the footnote issue you mention can be done in block macros, but I'm not sure.

I might be getting a bit utopian here, but what would be really great is if all these markup languages sought to have their canonical implementation in pandoc, which would allow for the standardisation of a set of pass-throughs/filters/annotations for things like equations and citations.

Thanks for pandoc, btw. Just out of interest, is there a reason you haven't attempted an AsciiDoc reader? (Or have you?) Assuming it'd be quite a bit more work than the others, what with macros and so forth.

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#76

Post by fiddlosopher »

lorddoig wrote: post #75
fiddlosopher wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AsciiDoc is a nice project, but I think that pandoc's variant of Markdown has a lot of advantages over AsciiDoc for academic writing. Let's just compare support for math and citations, for example. Pandoc's citation support is output-format independent: you can write the citations, specify a CSL stylesheet and bibliography, and you'll get the same output in every format pandoc supports. In AsciiDoc, as I understand i…

The CommonMark is definitely more readable, but Markdown is just so sparse by design that every time I tried to use it for anything more serious than e.g. a blog post I found myself banging my head against the wall, so it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make - and we're talking about languages whose purpose is to produce readable output, so while a readable source file is definitely a nice thing I think it's hard to make a…

See https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/1456.

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#77

Post by novaleaf »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #57
timtylin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AsciiBook. Everything but the name. If we ever get an amazing collaborative development tool like Github that has built-in AsciiBook rendering, this project would have been called "Scholarly AsciiBook (but we got Unicode support too I swear really)". Edit: I was wrong about Github not supporting AsciiDoc

Github does render asciidoc using asciidoctor. What is missing in that that is possible in Markdown?

fyi asciidoctor allows using markdown syntax inside your asciidoc file.

citation: http://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference/...

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#78

Post by timtylin »

j2kun wrote: post #73
timtylin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually been wondering if this is possible from a theoretical standpoint. I'm thinking you can use Pandoc's LaTeX to MD conversion mode, save changes to a copy, wdiff to get the total change set, then somehow convert that into a LaTeX patch. Whether you can guarantee that this won't break anything is going to be a really challenging problem, as my head is already swimming with edge-cases. I guess we'll know the…

In any case, my point is plain and simple: I collaborate in almost everything I do, and my collaborators are my primary concern when I choose a tool. If they use notepad and Dropbox, I need to make sure my tools don't conflict with that. There's no way in hell I would ask a collaborator to learn to use git or a new markup language just to work with me. I'd love a tool that works with this philosophy, and I feel certa…

As a thought exercise, assuming for simplicity that you can isolate the parts you're authoring, so that your changes only involve additions to other people's work: what kind of additional metainfo would you need for this workflow? All defined labels and macros? Available bib entries? What else?

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#79

Post by Skywing »

Part of the beauty of markdown, imo, is its simplicity. If I ever have a question about markdown syntax, I can glance at the original docs and have the answer in less than 30 seconds.

Re: A Scholarly Markdown

#80

Post by timtylin »

stared wrote: post #6

This thing is certainly needed (vide this discussion: https://hackpad.com/New-scientific-markup-language-utAjFcYuv... ), but what would be really convincing is examples (or I am missing them?). As a side note, a lot of Markdown + LaTeX + Code can be done in IPython Notebook. (Though, there are some things absent, like referencing citations or other equations).

I've just updated the website to include a link to a repo where I am putting all the examples I have permission to share.

https://github.com/timtylin/scholdoc-examples

More will be added as I tweak the syntax. My hidden goal is to add enough to ScholarlyMarkdown to be able to reproduce around 70% of ArXiv.

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