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Reading the comments here, it feels like people miss the whole point of markdown. Markdown's raison d'être is, "if you follow these conventions when doing ASCI

Reading the comments here, it feels like people miss the whole point of markdown. Markdown's raison d'être is, "if you follow these conventions when doing ASCII art formatting, the my program can transform this to HTML or whatever other format". The conventions being mostly the ones used in the pre-HTML email era, like underlining headings with a bunch of ======. Orgmode is completely different to that. Orgmode is an "outliner/GTD" at heart, but this aspect has been buried under a ton of features. Then if you want "prawfishunal qvalitat" advanced formatting, typesetting and layout control what you really want is something like Latex. Yet another whole different thing.

lifthrasiir 8y ago
But Markdown was advertised as "a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers" [1]. The raison d'être as you stated is not an end goal but a possible benefit. Gruber may have thought that the extensibility of Markdown is done by raw HTML; now we know that's not enough. [1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
hyperion2010 8y ago
The thing about org mode is that it has everything you need to do the full fancy latex typesetting without loosing the ability to export to other formats the way you do if you write raw latex. Of course there are times when you have no choice but to duplicate a block if you are doing something really fancy, but that is a fairly rare occurrence.
omaranto 8y ago
Of course Org Mode is completely different, because it can do tons of other stuff. But among it's many features, it also has lightweight markup syntax about which you could claim "if you follow these conventions when doing ASCII art formatting, the my program can transform this to HTML or whatever other format". And the conventions in Org Mode are also email-like in the sense that they don't look out of place in something meant to be plain text. (Maybe finding some large email corpus could answer which syntax is more email-like between Org Mode and Markdown, and maybe Markdown wins on that front, but my point is both syntaxes are lightweight for the most commonly needed markup.)
klibertp 8y ago
> Orgmode is completely different to that. Org has just much larger scope than Md. The whole feature set of Markdown covers a tiny fraction of Org features. NOTE: my use case is writing high-quality, good looking technical and user manual-like documentation. Org-the-format is very close semantically to ReST - most of Org constructs have a direct equivalent in ReST, and vice versa - rather than to Markdown. And Org-the-system is very similar to Sphinx (the documentation/article/paper creation tool in Python) or Scribble. They are functionally equivalent - headless Emacs in Docker with Org/Babel and Sphinx - and it's unfortunately very hard to justify choosing the former over the latter. I know - I just tried this past half a year and failed, even though I could count on a lot of goodwill from my co-workers :( (I'm ignoring the agenda, timelog, notes, spreadsheet, and all the kitchen sinks which also come with Org because they tend to be of private use, and I'm focusing on professional context) The situation changes drastically, of course, if you do use Emacs. The Emacs' UI for Org, which is yet another thing from Org-the-format and Org-the-(headless)-executable-exporting-to-html/pdf, is incredibly powerful. Examples of features: storing, pasting and inserting and following links, footnotes, images. Structural modification of the document without hassle (no more missing text after reordering a list!). Ability to edit all code and examples in their corresponding modes (with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc.) Ability to run a single chosen code block with a key-press, inserting or updating (or not) the results into document. Support for editing tables - rearranging columns and rows. Latex, PlantUML, and dozens of other languages and tools integration... These are all very nice, very powerful features - and that's on top on whatever conveniences you have already configured in your Emacs, too. Unfortunately, without the UI, Org is no more useful than Sphinx. On the other hand, no one's going to switch to another editor just to edit the docs, nor should they be forced to. I like Org. I store my notes and some todo lists in it, I enjoy Babel (support for IPython/Jupyter notebook style development but polyglot), I maintain some parts of my blog in Org (long and unwieldy otherwise lists nested to a few levels). I cannot, however, see any reason to introduce Org as a tool for my team at work, unless they all see the light and come over to Emacs side :) PS. a bit off-topic but I need to vent a bit: the API of Org is just awful! Functions for traversing the structure of the document are both in outline and org modes, and it's hard to know which is where and why. There are myriads of ways to get the current element, none of which is simple. A lot of the processing is still based on text search and substitution, instead of AST. It's not trivial to go from source to AST, either. I found at least 2 bugs in macro expansion code. I wanted to syntax-highlight the results of a code block (JSON was returned) and I had to hack around in header/keyword parsing for this. To be honest - some of my enthusiasm vanished after the experience :(

lifthrasiir 8y ago

But Markdown was advertised as "a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers" [1]. The raison d'être as you stated is not an end goal but a possible benefit. Gruber may have thought that the extensibility of Markdown is done by raw HTML; now we know that's not enough. [1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

hyperion2010 8y ago

The thing about org mode is that it has everything you need to do the full fancy latex typesetting without loosing the ability to export to other formats the way you do if you write raw latex. Of course there are times when you have no choice but to duplicate a block if you are doing something really fancy, but that is a fairly rare occurrence.

omaranto 8y ago

Of course Org Mode is completely different, because it can do tons of other stuff. But among it's many features, it also has lightweight markup syntax about which you could claim "if you follow these conventions when doing ASCII art formatting, the my program can transform this to HTML or whatever other format". And the conventions in Org Mode are also email-like in the sense that they don't look out of place in something meant to be plain text. (Maybe finding some large email corpus could answer which syntax is more email-like between Org Mode and Markdown, and maybe Markdown wins on that front, but my point is both syntaxes are lightweight for the most commonly needed markup.)

klibertp 8y ago

> Orgmode is completely different to that. Org has just much larger scope than Md. The whole feature set of Markdown covers a tiny fraction of Org features. NOTE: my use case is writing high-quality, good looking technical and user manual-like documentation. Org-the-format is very close semantically to ReST - most of Org constructs have a direct equivalent in ReST, and vice versa - rather than to Markdown. And Org-the-system is very similar to Sphinx (the documentation/article/paper creation tool in Python) or Scribble. They are functionally equivalent - headless Emacs in Docker with Org/Babel and Sphinx - and it's unfortunately very hard to justify choosing the former over the latter. I know - I just tried this past half a year and failed, even though I could count on a lot of goodwill from my co-workers :( (I'm ignoring the agenda, timelog, notes, spreadsheet, and all the kitchen sinks which also come with Org because they tend to be of private use, and I'm focusing on professional context) The situation changes drastically, of course, if you do use Emacs. The Emacs' UI for Org, which is yet another thing from Org-the-format and Org-the-(headless)-executable-exporting-to-html/pdf, is incredibly powerful. Examples of features: storing, pasting and inserting and following links, footnotes, images. Structural modification of the document without hassle (no more missing text after reordering a list!). Ability to edit all code and examples in their corresponding modes (with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc.) Ability to run a single chosen code block with a key-press, inserting or updating (or not) the results into document. Support for editing tables - rearranging columns and rows. Latex, PlantUML, and dozens of other languages and tools integration... These are all very nice, very powerful features - and that's on top on whatever conveniences you have already configured in your Emacs, too. Unfortunately, without the UI, Org is no more useful than Sphinx. On the other hand, no one's going to switch to another editor just to edit the docs, nor should they be forced to. I like Org. I store my notes and some todo lists in it, I enjoy Babel (support for IPython/Jupyter notebook style development but polyglot), I maintain some parts of my blog in Org (long and unwieldy otherwise lists nested to a few levels). I cannot, however, see any reason to introduce Org as a tool for my team at work, unless they all see the light and come over to Emacs side :) PS. a bit off-topic but I need to vent a bit: the API of Org is just awful! Functions for traversing the structure of the document are both in outline and org modes, and it's hard to know which is where and why. There are myriads of ways to get the current element, none of which is simple. A lot of the processing is still based on text search and substitution, instead of AST. It's not trivial to go from source to AST, either. I found at least 2 bugs in macro expansion code. I wanted to syntax-highlight the results of a code block (JSON was returned) and I had to hack around in header/keyword parsing for this. To be honest - some of my enthusiasm vanished after the experience :(