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?

Comments

Yes

[Ardeaem]

I used to use LaTeX for everything, but I have switched to markdown for presentations, papers, tech reports, and even everyday statistical analysis (probably, they'll turn into tech reports anyway). LaTeX is way too finicky for everyday use. markdown doesn't completely fail over a misplaced character, while LaTeX will. Of course, you're giving up a lot of power by moving to markdown, but I find for most things markdown provides a good balance of usability and flexibility. I still use LaTeX for papers I'm going to submit to scientific journals, which is where I need the features of LaTeX.

I use the Rmarkdown flavor of markdown.

I use emacs

[foobar bazbot]

Because it has C-x M-c M-butterfly.

Re:Yes

[buchner.johannes]

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).

Scrivener

[Tridus]

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.

Re:Yes

[Will.Woodhull]

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.