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When it comes to Markdown its main advantage is not its features (it does not have many), but its simplicity (and ability to edit it in a text editor - blazing
by stared 11y ago
When it comes to Markdown its main advantage is not its features (it does not have many), but its simplicity (and ability to edit it in a text editor - blazing fast, no distractions, etc). And then I can convert it to anything.
Vs LaTeX - sometimes I need just to note (a to do list, a draft of a blog post, an outline of workshop), without the boilerplate or visual noise of LaTeX.
(And I wrote more than a dozen of papers in LaTeX - so mine argument isn't "LaTeX is too hard".)
That said, I enjoyed using Overleaf - but mainly for teaching LaTeX (no installation, very nice and readable error messages, nice examples (I use your default page as the first introduction)). But for anything longer it's a pain that everything needs to recompile every few keystrokes (especially on a slow connection); I know it's not you but LaTeX; but for the same reason sometimes (when not requiring full features of LaTeX) it's easier to use Markdown + MathJaX.
- JohnHammersley 11y agoThat's a good summary, and the ability to easily convert to e.g. html is definitely a plus point for markdown. I always find however that I'd rather either work in html (for any web content), LaTeX (for any research papers or lengthy docs) or plain text (for notes)... I never found markdown quite useful enough in any of those cases (it has been a while since I last gave it a serious test though).
- omaranto 11y agoYour plain text notes are actually in Markdown already. :)
- stared 11y agoGitHub README.md files are a nice example for use case. It is a text file, but which can use lists, code inclusions, links and images (the later are not available in text mode... unless you want to do ASCII art). When it comes to notes opinion vary. Some use Markdown (BTW: for notes I only keep them in the plain text mode - so the only difference is some highlighting), some org-mode, some various other tools.