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As a techie who writes a lot of docs, I kinda hate Markdown. I use Markdown for all my to-do lists and notes, but it sucks balls at conveying complex informatio
by throwaway787544 4y ago
As a techie who writes a lot of docs, I kinda hate Markdown. I use Markdown for all my to-do lists and notes, but it sucks balls at conveying complex information in compact form and being readable. Any good docs written with it need touching up to be easier to read. With 10-20 additional formatting functions it would be decent.
Meanwhile, most word processors have crappy UX and require training to figure out the mystic incantations to get the presentation right, and then screw it up at save/export time. We could definitely do better.
- gumby 4y agoIt was intended to be a simple way to type a few html tags from a time when there weren’t many. The idea was if you needed more you’d switch to a “real” tool. Which is a long explanation for “your needs exceed the capabilities of that tool, and thus your dislike is rational.” The various extensions that add additional capabilities, such as the ones you describe always force me to consult documentation (which kind of defeats the purpose) and, as you note, they all suck balls.
- dredmorbius 4y agoAs I commented some years ago regarding another tool: it's a simple tool, designed for simple tasks. A constant of my own career has been pushing tools well beyond their reasonable limits. That's usually an exceptionally reliable sign that I need to find a more appropriate tool. Markdown is a tool for conveniently generating rudimentary HTML quickly and with low overhead. Using tools such as Pandoc, this extends ot other markup languages. But the point remains that once you've pushed Markdown to its limits, you should choose a more appropriate tool. I lean toward LaTeX myself, though HTML is often useful as well.
- thangalin 4y agoMy FOSS desktop text editor, KeenWrite[0], completely separates content from presentation. There are a handful of ConTeXt-based "themes"[1] that act as starting points for understanding the magic incantations of mapping XHTML into TeX. The XHTML is produced by converting Markdown documents. Producing a PDF file from TeX rarely messes up when exporting and the output is pleasing.[3] Mind you, TeX isn't all that user-friendly, so having the power/correctness of TeX with the "simplicity" of GUI-based word processors would be amazing. [0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite [1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes [2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/screenshots.md https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/scr...
- forgotmypw17 4y agoThe reason I dislike Markdown is that it more often than not formats things I didn't want formatted at all, escaping the formatting tokens is not intuitive and inconsistent across different implementations, AND if I were to copy and paste the text, I have to start the same dance all over again. I don't say the F word about many things, but F Markdown.
- analog31 4y agoIndeed, I'm not in love with Markdown, but I think its acceptance is a sign that people are willing to give up the power of word processing in return for greater agility and portability, for lack of better terms. Probably my main uses of Markdown are for Jupyter notebooks and services that render it automatically such as GitHub.