Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#81

Post by fiddlosopher » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

igravious wrote: post #63

I feel like this is the tech comparison equivalent of straw-manning. Take xrefs for instance. They say that the Markdown is: See [Usage](#_usage). Usage and that the AsciiDoc is: See >. == Usage I mean, clear win for AsciiDoc, right? So I Google "cross reference" "markdown and get this SO post as the first hit: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5319754/cross-reference-... – 802 point answer saying to do this: Take…

In pandoc's extended Markdown you can just write

    # Usage

    See [Usage].

https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-implicit_header_ref...

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#82

Post by JohnL4 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #29

submeta wrote: post #26

While we are at it: Why not orgmode? It‘s much more versatile. But I still go back to markdown because everyone (and almost every tool I use) will accept it.

I also prefer .org files for anything. It does almost everything Markdown does with just as simple syntax, but then can be used for any more comprehensive purpose by being fully LaTeX compatible. Although I think this strong coupling with Emacs has unfortunately caused it to stay in that niche, even though most of those scripted interactions aren't really important for the common use-cases. It also doesn't help that…

2nd. I'm a heavy org-mode user but the problem w/org-mode is that it's got emacs in front of it, and you are just not going to get uptake. Pandoc's not really a solution, either, apart from a one-time extraction of org-mode to whatever other format is desired. As soon as you get multiple non-emacs editors, your pandoc trip is over.

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#83

Post by wyuenho » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #39

baby wrote: post #36

I just wrote an entire book in asciidoc and honestly I don't like a lot of the decisions and the syntax, the tooling is also quite messy and hard to use/configure. Having said that, I'm not sure if there's really any alternative. If you need the extensibility and diff-ability of asciidoc, then you're probably going to have to use it. If you don't need it, stick with markdown. EDIT: so that people get an idea, I use a…

RestructuredText (usually used within Sphinx) is the only alternative in the same class. Unfortunately there are hardly any comparisons. Maybe there are no people who have significant experience with both.

Here's a comparison.

https://hyperpolyglot.org/lightweight-markup

Aside, I still don't understand why restructuedText never took off. The language is so expressive and well-documented, there are anchored references and tables, you can write you academic papers in it and just generate PDFs from it afterwards. There are so many constructs that Markdown and friends don't have.

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#84

Post by GiovanniP » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

Sr_developer wrote: post #77

jokteur wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question may be a bit naive, but it comes from somebody who has never used asciidoc but used a lot of LaTeX to make reports, poster, presentations, ... Why are you using asciidoc to write a book, instead of LaTeX ? I see the advantage of using this for documentation, but for an entire book ?

LaTeX books are ugly. We need an open source alternative to https://www.princexml.com/samples/ Or at least one not that expensive.

> We need an open source alternative to https://www.princexml.com/samples/

TeXmacs: https://www.texmacs.org

As far as I know e.g. this book https://www.editions-ellipses.fr/accueil/4856-le-petit-pytho... has been written with TeXmacs, and antoher is in preparation by the same author. Also, Joris van der Hoeven has written a guide to TeXmacs ("The Jolly Writer") using TeXmacs

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#85

Post by enriquto » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

bloak wrote: post #79

enriquto wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I finally got around to adding some "quail" stuff to my .emacs Why into .emacs and not into the global keyboard configuration? Don't you ever write text outside of emacs?

Yes, good question. One reason is that I haven't found a convenient portable way of modifying Linux keyboard configurations. Another is that sometimes I'm SSH-ing in from a machine that isn't even Linux. I have used xkbcomp to replace a character I don't need with one I do, but the recipe tends to require maintenance and I don't know how to program dead keys with that approach. Perhaps there's a better way nowadays.

I was somehow expecting the answer to be: "Yes, I do all my keyboard input from inside emacs, including running the shell".

For linux-portable keyboard configuration, you may find that an unholy mix of setxbmap (to set up the grand options) and xmodmap (to modify a few particular keys) is what works best for you. At least it does for me.

> sometimes I'm SSH-ing in from a machine that isn't even Linux.

ah! the horror!

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#86

Post by 41b696ef1113 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

jokteur wrote: post #38

baby wrote: post #36

I just wrote an entire book in asciidoc and honestly I don't like a lot of the decisions and the syntax, the tooling is also quite messy and hard to use/configure. Having said that, I'm not sure if there's really any alternative. If you need the extensibility and diff-ability of asciidoc, then you're probably going to have to use it. If you don't need it, stick with markdown. EDIT: so that people get an idea, I use a…

This question may be a bit naive, but it comes from somebody who has never used asciidoc but used a lot of LaTeX to make reports, poster, presentations, ... Why are you using asciidoc to write a book, instead of LaTeX ? I see the advantage of using this for documentation, but for an entire book ?

Having written my fair share of Latex, I will chime in that I despise the language. Verbose, too many special characters I need to escape (copy and pasting text becomes a chore), slow to compile, mystery number of compilation steps, and horrible debugability.

None of these are showstoppers, but quite a few paper cuts that leave me reaching for Latex only as a last resort. There are tooling and workflows one can adopt to minimize the pain, but it requires a lot of setup if I just want to get some text on a page.

I have stupidly optimistic hopes that something like [Skribilo](https://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/) would take over in this space, but I know that is foolhardy. Would require a generation of physicists and mathematicians to give up their hard-won Latex knowledge.

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#87

Post by michaelcampbell » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

It always bothered me that these ascii processors don't use /for italics/. It just looks visually like italics.

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#88

Post by breuleux » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #36

I just wrote an entire book in asciidoc and honestly I don't like a lot of the decisions and the syntax, the tooling is also quite messy and hard to use/configure. Having said that, I'm not sure if there's really any alternative. If you need the extensibility and diff-ability of asciidoc, then you're probably going to have to use it. If you don't need it, stick with markdown. EDIT: so that people get an idea, I use a…

I made a highly extensible markup language (inline macros, plugins, etc.) a while ago called Quaint[1] that I've been meaning to dive back into at some point. Out of curiosity, do you reckon it'd fit your use cases?

[1] https://breuleux.github.io/quaint/index.html

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#89

Post by charles_f » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

breuleux wrote: post #88

baby wrote: post #36

I just wrote an entire book in asciidoc and honestly I don't like a lot of the decisions and the syntax, the tooling is also quite messy and hard to use/configure. Having said that, I'm not sure if there's really any alternative. If you need the extensibility and diff-ability of asciidoc, then you're probably going to have to use it. If you don't need it, stick with markdown. EDIT: so that people get an idea, I use a…

I made a highly extensible markup language (inline macros, plugins, etc.) a while ago called Quaint[1] that I've been meaning to dive back into at some point. Out of curiosity, do you reckon it'd fit your use cases? [1] https://breuleux.github.io/quaint/index.html

My one comment: what I like about Markdown is that the "code" itself is readable, you don't have to effectively transform it to HTML, as is it almost looks like some text with a few characters here and there to emphasize things. Quaint's .q files look too much like source code to me, you wouldn't want to read them as is.

Re: Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown

#90

Post by criddell » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #36

I just wrote an entire book in asciidoc and honestly I don't like a lot of the decisions and the syntax, the tooling is also quite messy and hard to use/configure. Having said that, I'm not sure if there's really any alternative. If you need the extensibility and diff-ability of asciidoc, then you're probably going to have to use it. If you don't need it, stick with markdown. EDIT: so that people get an idea, I use a…

Did you do everything yourself? I'm wondering because I've always assumed that everybody you hand your book to down the line (editor and publisher) is going to want to use Word.