3 ms·

That sounds like quite an accomplishment. At this point I don’t even think I would try.

kstrauser 6y ago
Hard parts: - It's Markdown, not Word - Finding an editor that felt comfortable. (BTW, iA Writer is awesome for this.) Easy parts: - "You never have to care about formatting again!" - "Two people can edit stuff at the same time and we can work out the differences later, instead of playing the 'who has the most recent version?' game." - "Look, you just write text and a nice document with logos pops out the other side, and all of the documents look nearly identical without even trying!" - "Git shows you the full history of every line of this file." - "Hey, cryptographic signatures you can use to irrefutably prove the history of the document!" - "This 'pull request' thing in GitHub shows you exactly the changes you made, like 'track changes' except they're all in one place!"
- TacticalTable 6y ago
  Seconding iA Writer. I especially enjoy the focus and editing modes.
- gen220 6y ago
  The easy parts are what make it a selling product. I'd love to see "github for non-developers", that is little more than a markdown-app, with a thin wrapper around some git server and pandoc. Most CMSs implement all the hard stuff (version control, document generation) themselves, but exposing some of the "knobs" of pandoc/markdown/git and letting users run amok is kind of all you need to do, imo. Confluence is kind of like this, but limited to the production of web pages.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    The idea had crossed my mind.
  - barumi 6y ago
    > I'd love to see "github for non-developers", that is little more than a markdown-app, with a thin wrapper around some git server and pandoc. Aren't you describing a wiki?
    - gen220 6y ago
      Sort of. (See my last sentence in the above sentence, about how “confluence is close”). Wikis are limited to rendering information in a webpage format. The benefit of pandoc is that you can render it in any format you like, with arbitrary filters and styling. So you can display the content in a webpage, but you can also render it into PDFs with full legal headers and footers, and footnotes with links, to be physically printed and mailed to people. It’s a level of abstraction once removed from a wiki.
- ricksharp 6y ago
  Nice! I’m teaching my children to write their school papers in markdown for similar reasons. I use a github PR to provide feedback.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    This is a great idea.

Hard parts: - It's Markdown, not Word - Finding an editor that felt comfortable. (BTW, iA Writer is awesome for this.) Easy parts: - "You never have to care about formatting again!" - "Two people can edit stuff at the same time and we can work out the differences later, instead of playing the 'who has the most recent version?' game." - "Look, you just write text and a nice document with logos pops out the other side, and all of the documents look nearly identical without even trying!" - "Git shows you the full history of every line of this file." - "Hey, cryptographic signatures you can use to irrefutably prove the history of the document!" - "This 'pull request' thing in GitHub shows you exactly the changes you made, like 'track changes' except they're all in one place!"

TacticalTable 6y ago
Seconding iA Writer. I especially enjoy the focus and editing modes.
gen220 6y ago
The easy parts are what make it a selling product. I'd love to see "github for non-developers", that is little more than a markdown-app, with a thin wrapper around some git server and pandoc. Most CMSs implement all the hard stuff (version control, document generation) themselves, but exposing some of the "knobs" of pandoc/markdown/git and letting users run amok is kind of all you need to do, imo. Confluence is kind of like this, but limited to the production of web pages.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  The idea had crossed my mind.
- barumi 6y ago
  > I'd love to see "github for non-developers", that is little more than a markdown-app, with a thin wrapper around some git server and pandoc. Aren't you describing a wiki?
  - gen220 6y ago
    Sort of. (See my last sentence in the above sentence, about how “confluence is close”). Wikis are limited to rendering information in a webpage format. The benefit of pandoc is that you can render it in any format you like, with arbitrary filters and styling. So you can display the content in a webpage, but you can also render it into PDFs with full legal headers and footers, and footnotes with links, to be physically printed and mailed to people. It’s a level of abstraction once removed from a wiki.
ricksharp 6y ago
Nice! I’m teaching my children to write their school papers in markdown for similar reasons. I use a github PR to provide feedback.
- leephillips 6y ago
  This is a great idea.