Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Use Markdown and Pandoc?
BartlebyScrivener writes "I am a author, screenwriter, law prof, and a hobbyist programmer. I love MacVim and write almost everything in it: Exams, novels, even screenplays now that Fountain is available. I use LaTeX and WordPress and so on, but several years ago I discovered Markdown and the wonderful Pandoc. I searched Slashdot expecting to find lively discussions of both Markdown and Pandoc, but found nothing. Do Slashdotters look down their noses at these tools and do their work in HTML and LaTeX? I can't imagine computer geeks using Word instead of their favorite text editors. If not Markdown and Pandoc, what tools do Slashdotters use when they create documents that probably need to be distributed in more than one format: HTML, PDF, EPUB or perhaps even docx?" And then there's DocBook, LyX, and a host of other markup languages. What do you use, in what context?
I use landslide. Somewhat fancier html5 slide output.
reStructuredText. It is a lot more powerful than Markdown while still maintaining beauty. It is a bit more strict with formatting though, as is always the tradeoff for more power.
I use the Rmarkdown flavor of markdown.
Perhaps there's no conversation because there's no particular controversy, and thus, nothing to discuss?
I use markdown all the time. Mostly moc on Mac to edit it.
Markdown is gaining popularity again thanks to the environment and community around GitHub. That said, I afraid that most people still would prefer wysiwyg systems, as it easier to use than 'feel like a programmer' when using weird codes such as HTML, MarkDown, bbcodes, MediaWiki etc.
shamelessly putting forward a young project of mine but look, here I'm using markdown (piped to anything, pandoc works fine) inside HTML documents and in multiple blocks throught the document.
webnomad is a minimal implementation to use <markdown> </markdown>inside a plain html and bootstrap styled website. I hope this inspires someone. I'd advocate for markup tags inside HTML6 eheh
I use the BEST editor there is - $EDITOR.
I save files as 7bit ASCII, hard-wrap at column 72, and if a file extension is required, i use .txt.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
I can't imagine computer geeks using Word instead of their favorite text editors.
Indeed, everyone has his favorites. People have argued text editors to death. Find what works for you and use it (and stop flaming us). Also, programmers write software, not documentation. All document conversions are left to the secretary (and she may do it in any way she pleases).
I use HTML when I just want a document that works everywhere. When I want to impress or actually care about typography, I use InDesign and render to PDF—nothing beats its optical margins and paragraph-optimized justification.
Markdown strikes me as something really great for people who don't know HTML. Otherwise, it doesn't really save you a significant amount of typing and it is significantly less powerful.
I think you have a bunch of axis going on here at the same time.
1) Open source tools vs. closed source
2) General use vs. specialized
3) WYSIWYM vs. WYSIWYG editing.
Let's start with (3). I generally like WYSIWYM more than WYSIWYG environments. That being said WYSIWYG is very useful for content where consistency doesn't matter as much. While there are WYSIWYM systems for presentations but they only really work for data publishing better than WYSIWYG. I think a fairer comparison on this axis might be LyX vs. Word or FrameMarker vs. Word. Going up something like higher end composition engines vs. something like InDesign.
Then there is general use vs specialized. LaTeX is optimized for text with equations which is specialized. Fountain is for screenplays. That's not the same as a product like Word which is all purpose.
Finally open source vs. closed source is a complicating factor. When we consider Word do we consider all the myriad additional cost extensions, for example SharePoint or just the core product? For OpenSource do we consider the entire platform and how these components work together? More importantly closed vs. open goes beyond editing to broader computing issues.
Because it has C-x M-c M-butterfly.
LyX for reports and paper writing, with some raw LaTeX sprinkled in. I have a short python script that can merge multiple documents so I don't have extremely long bulks of content. And there is the python environment for LaTeX, which is awesome with sympy and matplotlib.
LibreOffice for quick documents perhaps with images for a quick WYSIWYG. There is no reason to do everything in text, for some (many?) things the feedback loop is just way too long.
reStructuredText for code documentation, anything that should be readable from command line, but also can be used to make pretty html websites. Sphinx helps. rst exports into plenty of formats via docutils (just expand for rst2* commands).
Converters to epub for stuff I want to read on my ebook reader (from Calibre).
For the text formats my usual editor is gedit. Simple and plain.
It doesn't matter much if you prefer Markdown or rst, that's like arguing which wiki has the best syntax. There are plenty of utilities that can cross-convert and export (pandoc is one of them).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I use asciidoc as a quick and easy way to take minutes of meetings. I usualy mail the participants a quite decent-looking pdf version of the minutes immediately after the end of the meeting. I also use gitit as a personal wiki. I must admit that I sometimes confuse the syntax of the markdown used by gitit with the quite similar asciidoc. I could switch to pandoc for my minutes, of course, but the pdf produced by asciidoc looks a lot nicer than pandoc's
That's classic!
If you're writing a novel, a tool like Scrivener is a lot better than a text editor of any particular sort. It's designed for writers and makes it easy to do things like keep track of and organize all your notes, which if you're writing a novel is going to be far more important than whatever command is used to change the font.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I use LibreOffice, because I hardly do html and need to keep compatible with the crap they use at the customer and the employer when it comes to office formats.
In general, most commercial text editors are lousy at both editing and layout, but they contain all the "features" that people who don't understand either find handy to mangle their documents with. LibreOffice isn't that different from the others in that respect, but at least it's free and it runs on all the systems I use for daily work, regardless of their OS.
When I have to work on code or markup languages, I generally use VIM, since it's also on practically all the systems I use for this sort of work.
Since I have to often rely on systems with nothing but generic stuff installed, I don't want to have to bother with setting up the "perfect environment" all the time, so I adapt by using what's easily available.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I take notes using the syntax of my employers wiki which makes it easy to cut and paste from my $EDITOR="joe". My custom syntax highlight file might not be perfect, but it certainly makes the text more colourful: trac.jsf
I use Emacs for writing; most of it is in XML (usually DocBook, sometimes TEI, occasionally XHTML). I use XSLT to transform it to LaTeX if I want publication-quality PDF, but more often the document is the input to other people's toolchains which want XML first. I occasionally transform to other formats (HTML, Word, or some wiki formats which are largely MarkDown-ish).
I author in XML because most of what I write involves quite detailed and very specific structure, and DocBook and TEI provide appropriate levels of markup for this. I made a conscious decision to go this way a very long time ago, when it was all still SGML, and I have never regretted it.
Most people don't have that level of specificity to adhere to. All the formats you mention have their areas of application, even Word, but there is a growing undercurrent towards using HTML5 as the default format, driven partly by the fact that Ebooks use it. The publishing industry is very interested, as they hate and detest Word, and only use it because its change tracking is useful and it has usable style-editing, which OpenOffice and friends don't have (ie they have no style margin like Word). It was very clear at the XML SummerSchool last month that there is growing support for HTML5 in editing tools, and some new advances in editorial control (eg systems like Xopus, FidusWriter, and Poetica) mean there may even be a way to escape from Word :-)
--
Disclaimer: editor interfaces are my thesis topic; I have no connection with any of the above except the XML SummerSchool.
...that any Slashdot posting opened up a new world to me. This is one of those - way too rare - postings. I use to write flat text, and hand that to secretaries or colleagues for formatting it into whatever they want or need: html, word, slides, whatever. Software documentation, to me, is generated javadoc - so basically html generated out of flat-text code comments. Of course I knew and know about the existence of LaTex et al.. Yet, as a software architect, I guess I have been, for decades, plain lazy. I simply write flat text in emacs or notepad++. Man, you opened up a universe to me !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
LyX for reports and paper writing, with some raw LaTeX sprinkled in. I have a short python script that can merge multiple documents so I don't have extremely long bulks of content.
\input{file.tex} is your friend, it's basically the latex equivalent of the include statement in many languages. It's particularly nice if you have a simulation, gnuplot etc. generating a splash of latex that you want to integrate in the full paper.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Markdown, Pandoc, and Vim/MacVim are my primary working tools for writing documentation.
I believed "Markdown and Pandoc" to be a work of 16th century French literature. By Alcofribas Nasier, is it not?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Your welcome.
My welcome? What does that even mean?
As a web developer, I understand the need to allow users to create content. However, I consider full blown web-based WYSIWYGs (such as TinyMCE and CK Editor) to be terrible tools. Yes, they take care of most of the dirty details, but they also have the capacity produce bloated garbage markup. I've always found bbCode annoying. I've used a couple of Wiki syntaxes as well (MediaWiki, Jira), and find them only slightly less annoying than bbCode. Because I know HTML, I prefer to just write HTML when I know the final format will be HTML.
Markdown syntax is clean, succinct, and can be extended when needed. The vast majority of non-savvy users only need to do basic formatting (bold, italics, headlines, lists) and Markdown covers that very well, in a way that the user can't do much damage to the prescribed styling of the content.
I've very briefly experimented with LaTEX, not enough to have actually used it for anything. I was not aware of PanDoc, but it looks very interesting.
You got it wrong; Markdowngrua and Pandocgruel is a famous work of Early Modern Portuguese literature.
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh, crap. I've mixed up countries again! At least both these languages are Slavic, aren't they? /s
Ezekiel 23:20
I like the emacs org mode (also available for vim, and even your mobile), though primarily for structured outlines/note-taking, its markup allows document formatting and it can export to a range of formats including PDF.
Notes, documents, TODOs, all in one format.
I use Latex for almost all my texts: small, large, letters, presentations, what-have-you.
Also I copy texts from web sites to Latex and print it out for reading.
For texts that are only for me I use: plain text.
I don't understand why some (most) people are scared of Latex. In Linux you just install per package manage Latex+Kile and then you are one mouse click away from a nice Pdf document.
Small example from http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
Gives you a very nice document to print out and read at your leisure.
\documentclass[10pt,abstract=no,toc=flat]{scrreprt}
\usepackage[hscale=0.69,vscale=0.79,heightrounded,includehead]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}[\section{Cargo Cult Science}]
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece
of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for
separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't
work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science.
\end{multicols}
\end{document}
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
I wrote my own in Python; uses PostgreSQL to hold the data, gives me unlimited stylesheet and substitution capabilities, generates HTML or whatever I want directly. Table of contents, indexes in various formats, footnotes, endnotes (references), chaptering and sub-sectioning, local and global variables, image handling and conversions, etc. Works a charm. And since I wrote it, I can add to it, fix it, etc.
Here's an example of an output document:
SdrDx Manual
When I want to typeset something crazy, I do it in an image manipulation system and then shovel the image in; that's about the only thing I've run into that would require more work than I'm willing to put in.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm pretty sure those are the names of the defensive tackles for the Browns.
You are welcome on my lawn.
vi with Doxygen, since most of what I write is code. Also for other documents (yes, Doxygen is designed to extract markup from special comments, but it doesn't care if the input file is one block comment. Just start the file with /** and end with */). Makes sense to use the same tool.
FYI, Doxygen also understands some HTML and recently added a subset of Markdown. I use a few HTML and Markdown elements, usually for lists and tables.
For some documents, I use pure HTML, such as my resume. This gives me more control of the formatting. Also, MS Word understands HTML, so to provide a ".doc" file, I just make a copy with the .doc extension.
I have tried other tools, like LateX and Lyx, but Doxygen and HTML cover %99.9 of my needs. (Wold be nice if Doxygen supported reStructuredText and MediaWiki markups.)
(FWIW, I prefer MediaWiki markup over Markdown. My biggest complaint with Markdown as compared to MediaWiki is the link syntax and link handling. I think MediaWiki links are much better than Markdown links.)
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I use it for blog postings, with the tables and footnotes plugins. I also use it when converting simple text files into e-books with Calibre, which has a built-in markdown converter. I have nothing against html, but typing an open and close tag for everything gets to be tedious when you just want to write something simple, especially for tables.
I've had to edit other people's book-length Word documents before. These tend to be a mess, because many people don't know how to use styles, so the formatting is a big mess. I copied the text in Markdown, formatted the headings as H1 and H2, wrote some simple html for the embedded images, converted the document to HTML, and imported it back into Word. It sounds like a lot of steps, but I was able to do this faster than clicking on 200 pages of the Word document to fix all the inconsistencies. It goes without saying that the person got the document back, and then messed up the formatting again, because they didn't think Word styles were a real thing.
As I recall, Cory Doctorow at a book signing mentioned he used Markdown or something similar in his writings, and then kept the documents under a version control system to be able to see the changes. This is something Markdown should excel at, much better than a wysiwyg editor.
It is "AN author", not "A author".
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Yes, definitely. I've found Markdown an excellent tool for writing. Pandoc (combined with Apple's TextUtil) has proven useful for converting older documents, to a certain degree, but I find I only use Markdown for serious writing. Am currently in the process of building a toolchain that converts Markdown writing into a variety of format, blogging about it here:
http://rubyredbricks.com/blog/2013/10/09/ruby-pub-part-1-toolchains/
and here:
http://rubyredbricks.com/blog/2013/10/02/ruby-and-hpub/
... if I knew where to look on /. for a guide to it. I don't even know how to quote a post.
For other things, Openoffice does everything I need. When I need a certain kind of fancy presentation I use Keynote.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Avoiding "Computationally expensive" stuff isn't the reason for using Latex.
When I use Latex, it's because I need to make a complex document with footnotes etc. and I want to use a real (i.e. programmable) text editor (GNU Emacs in my case).
LibreOffice has its uses, but you can't grep .odt files.
(Actually, instead of "LaTeX quality wysiwyg", which sounds like you want software other than Latex, but which gives equal quality, you probably meant to say "wysiwyg LaTeX". If that's the case, I agree. But since I'd written my comment before I spotted this, I'm posting it anyway.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Since wiki syntax has been mentioned, I'll jump in.
I now use wikitext for nearly all my writing, usually using gedit as the editor. My writing does not require the level of formating that LaTeX and its ilk are capable of. A good portion of my writing is in collaboration with others, and I want to grow that percentage since the text is consistently better when more than one person is stirring the word pot.
I've used several wiki engines since about 2003. At the moment Dokuwiki is my favorite: it has good ACL security, it handles embedded images and files okay, and it produces clean HTML5 pages. Mostly it behaves like Markdown in the way it gets out of my way when I'm using a plaintext editor.
An advantage of Dokuwiki and wikitext is that the semi-wysiwyg browser editor allows wider collaboration and effective proof-reading, by persons who don't want to learn a mark-up language, even a simple one.
When I need to do a brochure, business card, or other authoring task which is more about presentation than writing, then I use other tools. Inkscape is good, and I have done posters and slides in Gimp with little effort. But that is more about publishing than writing.
Will
If you use one tool for everything, you're lost in the amateur world.
Professionals in every profession on this planet have a vast array of tools and pick the right tool for the right job. It's one of the things that makes you a professional.
I personally use WYSIWYG editors for general text editing like letters, articles and some books. Stuff like Pages or iBooks Author (since I'm on a Mac).
For longer books and fiction, Scrivener is my tool of choice and since it can export epub, it was my tool of choice for the book I published last year. As an author's tool, it's fantastic and not at least knowing it (even if you find it's not to your taste) is like being a programmer and not knowing what an IDE is.
Speaking of which, I abhor IDEs for programming because all I've ever tested are sluggish and more confusing than worthwhile, and they never work the way I want, and I pity everyone who uses Eclipse. So for programming, HTML and such, Sublime Text 2 is my choice, though I've used TextMate for years and it was fantastic. For Subl, there is better plugin support, however, and its auto-completion and coding tools do almost everything that IDEs do, at least for the stuff I code (which is mostly web-programming, so I don't need a compiler and debugger built-in).
There's also LaTeX and LyX, which I haven't touched in a long time but I still love and I'm sure I'll find my way back to it eventually. There's also a bundle of other text-based tools I use for specific parts, like graphviz (which really shines if you use the GUI tool to get an instant-preview). Basically, to end where I started: I always try to look at the job and find the best tool for it. Swiss army knifes are cute if you're trecking and can't bring much stuff, but when you're on your computer and can bring whatever tools you want, bring the best ones, not the cute one.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Depends on what you're doing. You can't use grep, specifically, but you can search by regular expression in LibreOffice.
That's one way to slice it, but not the only way. I think publishing has an unhealthy relationship with LaTeX. Markup languages have come a long ways since 1980. Why are we so stuck on this one? Another language that is (1) more human readable (2) easier to machine parse (3) renders to equal or better quality (4) is wysiwyg friendly, should be quite possible.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
At one point I found myself composing some email (started with notes for a conference, then code-heavy email) in Github's editor, rendering, and then pasting into an email. And then I realized that I'm a programmer and can make stuff to do stuff. So I made Markdown Here (or the project page on Github). It's a Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera/Thunderbird/Postbox extension that allows you to write email in your normal email editor, but in Markdown, and then render it before sending. It also supports syntax highlighting and some TeX math support. And it works in Google Groups posts, Evernote (web interface) notes, Blogger posts, and so on -- anywhere that uses contentEditable or designMode for the editor (including TinyMCE-based and CKEditor-based ones).
So, yeah, I use Markdown for email. There are about 15,000 Markdown Here users, so I guess they're part of the answer too.
Notepad for text.
OpenOffice for markup & publishing.
Since I do write a lot of legal stuff (I thought I'd packed that racket in, but no, it won't let me...), I want/need something that loads in 0 seconds or close as dammit, doesn't have ANY bells and whistles to distract me, that can keep up with my typing speed (even OOo has problems sometimes, what with the app competing for CPU cycles with everything else, most importantly the keyboard buffer!), occasionally (particularly during meetings) I'll kick up a DOS session and use EDIT.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I write fiction, so my focus needs to be on the content rather than presentation, and I envision events in the story, not how the literal text appears. I had to use a non-WYSIWYG word processor called AppleWorks 2.0 on an Apple IIc long ago as a kid, and dealing with the codes was quite distracting; upgrading to WYSIWYG MultiScribe aka BeagleWrite, where I could pay attention just to the story, was a massive improvement.
Also, when it comes to fiction, the publisher is likely to control the appearance, and then many users will use Calibre to reformat it yet again to match how *they* prefer texts to look. Bye-bye hours of tinkering with margins.
If I was writing an article that involved mathematic equations or similar things where positioning is crucial, then it might make sense to use markup/markdown, as making sure everything is aligned properly and all that. It's just not a terribly reasonable approach to use if you're trying to immerse yourself in a novel.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
it is neither funny nor true.
I used to be
/usr/bin/vi, what else? Not vim, not elvis. No color, no auto-format, no hype.
Precisely. I write mostly in TeX (real TeX, not LaTeX) but use LibreOffice for some documents. One of the major reasons that I continue to use TeX is that I can edit it as I please, which generally means using GNU Emacs. LibreOffice and its kin are so much inferior as editors that I feel crippled when I have to use them. Indeed, when writing something that is mostly text, even if it is ultimately going to be formatted in LibreOffice, I almost always write it as plain text in Emacs, then import the plain text file into LibreOffice. TeX is also easier to edit using other Unix text tools and to generate programmatically. Perhaps surprisingly, I have also found it much easier to produce documents with a lot of images in TeX (using the psfig macros and dvips/dvipdf) than in LibreOffice. LibreOffice tends to get sluggish and to give me a hard time getting the images scaled the way I want them.
If you want wysiwyg markdown: on Windows, check out texts.io. On linux, Uberwiter. On Mac... there are probably lots of options besides texts.
If you write fiction, or any book-length texts (a Ph. D. thesis or academic papers, frex), you owe it to yourself to check out Scrivener. It's available for OS X, Windows, and in beta for Linux. Closed software and charged for, but worth it.
My favorite feature of markdown is that it can easily be used to collaborate with people without having them learn a complicated syntax. "Use the same formatting as I did" is all they need to know.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If I'm writing a paper, I use LaTeX. Yes, the macros are a pain, but I find it takes less time than writing a paper in, say, Word (page breaks, sections, image placement, etc. need only be written once in LaTeX, but in Word they need to be revisited at each draft); and LaTeX's output quality meets my standards (while Word's, say, doesn't).
If I'm writing documentation, I use Markdown. It's simple and it has links. The output quality is far lower, because I expect readers to prefer reading plain HTML anyway -- a PDF would be inconvenient for them, even if it would be prettier.
Generalizing those notions:
1. The best tool for the job is the one that lets you produce and edit content as quickly as possible, while meeting your requirements. In other words: if monospace, left-justified text files are satisfactory, you should probably be using plaintext. When starting a document, first pick a set of features, then choose the tool that has those features and gives you the fastest workflow.
2. Distributing in multiple formats shouldn't be a concern: you can convert pretty much any open format to any other. Your _master_ copy needs to encode all the features you use.
50% right.
The one true editor is vi (including alternate implementations such as nvi, vim, and busybox vi).
But bbcode? WRONG.
Troff is the right solution for multiformat documents. Including ones that need to be readable in word processors.
Half joking, half serious. I wrote my papers for Philosophy and Intro to UnixÂin troff. For Philosophy I converted them to RTF before submitting-which worked fairly well.
For Intro to Unix, I used -thtml and -tps. Again, it worked pretty well.
I can use Markdown, and have written a couple manpages.
(My favorite is for "segfault", a quick hack I threw together because someone was asking about example programs for a debugging presentation.)
By now you're probably thinking "Neckbeard!"...nope, I majored in agriculture; and those papers were for GE courses in the last couple years.
I used Ted for editing my longer papers, and found it to be generally satisfactory. Files are guaranteed to be readable on just about any computer, being RTF written properly. And the document actually ends up displaying the same in Word.
Ted runs quite happily on an 800-MHz processor, like the old PIII I used for a month or two after losing my laptop.
As someone that writes a great deal both for online and offline distribution, I use markdown *extensively*.
It's fabulous for the grunt work of formatting: headers, italics, links. The rest can be done by tossing in HTML, XML, or whatever other markup code is needed. It's fabulously lightweight and fast and unobtrusive.
In fact, for all those "I wrote my dissertation in LaTeX, *sniff* *sniff*" people here on Slashdot, how about this:
I wrote my dissertation on an iPad 2, in Daedalus, in markdown, embedding HTML or other kinds of markup as necessary, then formatting it all in a final pass through a couple different parser/formatters. Sometimes the right tool for the job is the one that you have to think about the least—the one that stays out of your way—and for me, that's markdown+Daedalus.
(Yes, I'm prepared for the onslaught of accusers, ridiculers, and doubters here—prepared to ignore them.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I use markdown + Deadalus for long-form (i.e. dozens of pages) content that will go to print.
I use markdown + Mou for short-form content that will go online.
If you write for online distribution at all and you don't know about Mou, you should definitely check it out. Similar statement for those that write books but don't know about Daedalus.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
...jEdit or gVim for entry, pandoc for conversion, Firefox for viewing in HTML. I take notes in markdown during tech meetings. It"s scary-fast to create good looking notes.
Write once in XML using domain-specific vocabulary and markup; convert to HTML/PDF/plaintext using XSL.
Simples.
In the past century, there was also this neat tool called Scribe which spawned a bunch of similar tools, such as Skribe, Scribble, and Exscribe. Essentially, a rather light-weight semantic markup (like Markdown etc.) but at the same time extensible and programmable (like TeX) in a sane language (unlike TeX) and with multiple backends (again, unlike TeX).
I wonder if there's a space in the lightweight markup space for a better markup than Markdown. That's what many people use, but it sure is limited, and not even the extensions themselves are extensible.
If you haven't done it yet, I also advise you to take a look at Pandoc and Asciidoc. These are rather complete tools that have some pretty neat functionality. (If you know them, perhaps this mention will be useful to someone else at least.)
Ezekiel 23:20
The flamebait mods are obviously from people who use the other editor.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Crap, this is starting to get embarrassing. :-) Please ignore the Pandoc mention. I intended to comment on that yesterday, but my intermittent connection got disconnected and when I got to it now, I had forgot by then that the question, besides Markdown, has *already* mentioned it.
Also, I'm surprised that nobody seems to be using ConTeXt instead of LaTeX.
Ezekiel 23:20
Mediawiki to update the ShapeOko wiki
LaTeX for page formatting / layout / pdf manipulation
LyX for general writing (but export to LaTeX to customize things)
InDesign at work.
I did use Scribus when updating the documentation of the ShapeOko hobby-level CNC milling machine though, and was disappointed that there wasn't an easy / obvious way to get the text from the wiki into Scribus --- couldn't there be a command in Scribus to open a web page as the basis of a document or a page?
I have added some ``engines'' which support pandoc to TeXshop though, but haven't gone beyond that.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
oh! hey! thanks. that's a good tip. I'll still keep the same approach in webnomad for non-js compat, but well I'm convinced we don't need new tag names.
For those doing scientific programming, the IPython notebook is a joyful place for interactive exploration and can be appropriate for document creation. Notebook cells can have code, images, or text, and text can mix Markdown and LaTeX (rendered in the cell via MathJax). Notebooks can be converted to HTML or PDF (via LaTeX), using the nbconvert utility (which depends on pandoc). For serious document production, this is not even remotely a replacement for LaTeX, but it can be a great place for interactive work.
The wiki community had their chance to standardize on a markup language but instead we have an atrocious assortment of wildly disparate syntaxes with Mediawiki unfortunately leading the charge... Now we need another one?
Ok; I'm old. I grew up using LaTeX for everything. Even generated invoices automatically from an ascii file of client/project/hours direct to printer using a Makefile. Now I don't 'write' anymore. I edit with vim and if I need to publish to html, I wrap the file with ... I simply don't care about formatting anymore. Content is where it's at.
That won't work for including LyX documents. However, there is a command for this in LyX (Insert > File > Child Document) – no scripting needed.
Same here. And I love the way it interfaces with SharePoint servers. I'm glad we're keeping the product on the DL though - the crowd here can be tough on those like us.
Ew. No. It doesn't accept numeric prefixes to commands, so it can't be considered a "real" vi implementation.
P.S.: This comment was proudly written in nvi, the vi clone that doesn't require you to tweak 10 variables to fully disable autoindenting.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Not flamebait, vi works everywhere
Korma: Good
\include{chapter} is even better, as it lets you do things like compile only a single chapter (but with correct page numbering and such) when you're working on something specific. \input is a lot more low-level.
The original question doesn't really ask about LaTeX, but everyone here is talking about that. So, is markdown used around or not?
I do use Markdown, it's convenient for quick formatting. I am not going to use LaTeX just for a few simple bold/italics needs...
I believed "Markdown and Pandoc" to be a work of 16th century French literature. By Alcofribas Nasier, is it not?
I never heard of them, either. Markdown is certainly not a tool used by nerds; nerds write their own HTML in a text editor, any one is as good as another. Wikipedia has never heard of Pandoc, either. Pity, I might have use of that but if it's too obscure for Wikipedia, well...
Free Martian Whores!
In fact, I started using LyX back in... 1997 or so?
Not only it is used and looks like a WYSIWYG editor, but actually frees your mind from actually caring how it will render on a page of a given size. Just write what you mean (they call it WYSIWYM — M for Mean), and when previewed/printed it will be beautiful. Why? Because it is LaTeX doing it.
I write my personal stuff in reStructuredText, which is like Markdown but with more processing possibilities and more extensible.
When it comes to professional stuff, depending on the size of the project, I use reStructuredText or DocBook.
DocBook is a must when complex stuff (like cross-references, recursive file inclusion...) is involved, and XML processing enables many fancy features, and output to many formats.
reStructuredText documents can be converted to DocBook, so it's possible to use a master DocBook document and rst fragments.
rst is definitely a plus for straight reading, collaborative edition and SCM.
DocBook is not as painful as binary files, but XML edition, diffs and merges is not as trivial as text chunks.
Then I use LaTeX for stuff with too many formulas, or stuff that really needs to look pretty.
But I dislike that there is no real separation between structure and looks of the document.
Also, LaTeX is harder to process and slower to compile.
DocBook or reStructuredText toolchains can process chunks of math code in LaTeX syntax, which is a nice tradeoff.
In all cases, writing non-trivial documents is easier when a good build system is used. ...) between documents, when using this kind of text-based tools.
What I like most is the ability to share external resources (chunks of text, generated data, images, generated images,
I started it when I was writing lots of text on an Alphasmart stand-alone keyboard, almost the best tool for first-draft writing. But really bad for editing. So I'd upload raw text to a file, for further processing on a real conputer. I wrote a program to do preliminary cleanup, making it more like HTML. Emacs after that.
Yes, that was over a decade ago. The program is written in Modula 3.
I discovered that the notation I was using on the alphasmart was more convenient than raw HTML, so I continued to use the ad-hoc notation even after I migrated to a laptop, and slowly changed it and the program according to taste. The program now generates .fodt files, which I do not edit.
My notation has no log-term syntactic nesting constraints (as HTML does with its and tags) so it is a natural for use in a revision management system. (Merges preserving tree structure are notoriously hard to do correctly; i.e., yielding valid tree structure after).
I'm considering changing to markdown. A project I'm involved i has chosen Asciidoc instead.
I consider ease of use with a revision management system (I use monotone) to be crucial.
The main feature I've found to make this easy is for the markup to use separators instead of brackets whenever possible. Thus use a mark to separate paragraphs rather than two to enclose them. Maybe there are a few things that can't be anaged this way, but for the most part the big things can be.
-- hendrik
Pangloss?
Pangloss?
Candidly, I think you're on the list for the best of all possible responses...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But the last time I cheked, none of the markdown-like systems offered that in a reasonable way. Semantic markup means that I do not simply make some text bold or italic, but I give the reason why it should be somehow formatted differently than the surrounding text. Reasons could be that it should be emphasized, it introduces a new term, or it is a foreign phrase (such as "a priori"). All this is usually set in italics, but sometimes it makes sense to change this for certain categories. Also, I guess, alternative output devices (such as audio or Braille devices) could benefit from this, although I am not aware of any practical details.
copy con filename.txt that's only on my fast pc, the slower ones I flip switches.
Reading the Ars Technica review it seems that LG desperately wanted it to be a copy of the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Personally I don't like Samsung (or probably this LG phone) because they change too much from the stock Android version. But I am happy with my Sony Xperia Z1. Very happy in fact, even though there's still some software problems (got update last night though, hopefully it's even better now).
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Although I have never used Python and I program in C++ 100% of time, if I were to rule the world I would issue an ultimatum to all programming languages to conform to Python syntax within 5 years after which all backward compatibility will be dropped! Python offers a terse human readable syntax. Now for a verbose machine readable syntax which is still very human friendly, I would choose XML. So again, Latex gets five years to confom to Python (terse) or XML (verbose) or both flavors. The idea is that we can keep on complicating things in the pretext of simplifying them. All we need is Python and XML syntax, syntax highlighint text editors (Vim for shell and Geany for GUI), PNG format for images and bzip2 to package all the stuff in a single file ready to be dispatched to a printer or a projector via a rendering application.
Really? The last time I used cards was due to a class requirement. I was taking a class that had a programming assignment and the professor actually wanted us to turn in card decks. So I sent a copy of the program to my virtual punch and sent a message to the operator asking him to send the file in my punch to a physical card punch. His response: SERIOUSLY? And this was back in my FORT-G and FORT-H days. I've never heard of anyone coming anywhere near an 029 keypunch in the F77 era. In fact, I think it was the quarter after I took that class when they finally ripped out the keypunches and the vending machines where students got blank cards.
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I think the grandparent post was talking about doing a search of files within a directory (or tree) outside the editing utility. What lunatic is going to manually load each file in a directory and repeat a search? (``Well, that string's not in this document... let's close this file and try the next one....'')
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Emacs wins because it can run Vi.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
You don't know that... and please pay attention:
"Depends on what you're doing."
You don't think I thought of that? I don't know what he wants to do, but I assumed the possibility that he might not know that LibreOffice search supports RE searches, and that it might possibly be useful to him. I don't know that it will be, but I also don't know that it won't be. It depends on what he's doing.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.