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I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use P
by andy99 3y ago
I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do write code in vim...
* I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178 https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178
- herdcall 3y agoI actually found more control in writing complex formulas and scientific notation with MD and then using pandoc to convert than with Word directly. Also, it's almost magical how pandoc does the conversion: fast, accurate, and without fuss.
- sixhobbits 3y agoWe do the opposite of this - we write in markdown but sometimes need to get feedback in Google Docs. Pandoc doesn't convert to google docs so well, but it does to docx, so our pipeline is markdown -> pandoc -> docx -> upload to google doc -> share
- ryanianian 3y agoMy kingdom for proper markdown support in google docs. Just let me toggle between wysiwyg vs markdown. Collaboration at a tech company using google docs is comically painful at times.
- jeffhwang 3y ago+1 strong agree. I like Google Docs’ realtime collaborative editing, but the wysiwyg formatting (even if one has memorized the keyboard shortcuts) makes it hard to be fast the way I am in a Markdown-aware editor or vim. Plus I miss my vim motions!
- bostik 3y agoI'd settle for a Markdown import. You could do your editing and writing of raw text in whatever you feel happy with, and then have gdocs transform it to its supposedly native format on upload. Gdocs would then really only need to support the same semantics with underscores, asterisks, octothorpe heading levels and title sizes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dkasak 3y agoOh boy, do I have a treat for you. Try saving the following as `input.md`: # Hello *world* ## Math $$x = 2 \cdot y^3$$ - foo - bar - baz 1. Yes 2. No 3. Maybe --- Right Left Center Default ------- ------ ---------- ------- 12 12 12 12 123 123 123 123 1 1 1 1 Table: Demonstration of simple table syntax. Then run pandoc -t html input.md | xclip -selection clipboard -t 'text/html' And paste into a Google doc.
- bostik 3y agoWhoah, that is a seriously neat trick. Thank you.
- greenpresident 3y agoFor documents that require a longer process, I prefer formats that I can use comments and TODO in, with a text editor that feels familiar. Other than that, I strongly agree. Word is also de facto standard when you want others to open and edit your document.
- maxerickson 3y agoWord has comments. They work well as todo markers if they don't need to be retained (just make a comment to mark something and then delete it when it is resolved).
- ravi-delia 3y agoYou know what, that's a sufficiently cursed workflow that it wraps back around to adding nerd cred
- queuebert 3y agoLike using a hex editor to build up a Word doc?
- 2cynykyl 3y agoI also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type using rolls of paper instead of sheets so he didn't have to stop is his process. He "got it". As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to write a complicated markdown table.
- Tomte 3y ago> writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. Or Scrivener. No Zotero plugin, though.
- graemep 3y ago> Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process MS Word or markup in an IDE are not the only options. I used to use Lyx quite a lot. The best of both worlds in many ways. There are text editors which give you a simple UI than an IDE without the distractions and complexity of a word processor. I find Kate quite pleasant to write in. There are distraction free writers editors (which will often save in wordprocessor formats) that exist only because a lot of people find wordprocessors are a "disaster for the creative process".
- _Algernon_ 3y agoMost tech people who use Word know how to use it and that is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back because others don't even know that styles exist and use manual / direct formatting instead. We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minutes out of their day to learn the basics of a tool they use professionally. It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to copy-paste, except it tangibly makes my day worse.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoYou might find it interesting that I never read any docx sent to me and instead run it through pandoc to convert it to markdown first.
- agumonkey 3y agoyou managed to find a lean way to go docx to pdf using pandoc ? last time i tried it required a whole latex stack behind it.
- __fst__ 3y agoProcess over Tools.
- lhamil64 3y agoOut of curiosity, why use Pandoc? Can't Word natively save as HTML, PDF, etc?
- themadturk 3y agoWithout an add-in (it may or may not exist anymore), Word cannot natively read from (and format) or write to (with markup) Markdown. Ask any one of several novelists who work in Markdown; once you convert it to Word (presumably via Pandoc) and send it to your editor/publisher, it stays in Word throughout the rest of the editorial process.