6 ms·
If this is implemented properly it’ll be a game changer for collaboration on papers. Means one can write a paper with colleagues in markdown and then easily kni
by bomewish 2y ago
If this is implemented properly it’ll be a game changer for collaboration on papers. Means one can write a paper with colleagues in markdown and then easily knit with pandoc/quarto. Cheaper than overleaf etc.
- gouggoug 2y agoI'll add that writing a paper might be better handled by a more feature-full format like Asciidoc.
- bt1a 2y agoWhy not a markdown doc + git with each colleague using their own text editor/IDE of choice?
- KeplerBoy 2y agoBecause not everyone is interested in setting up a Pandoc/Latex toolchain. Overleaf almost solved this problem but they don't support Pandoc as a frontend and want money unless you self-host.
- prmoustache 2y agoYou don't need pandoc and even less a latex(WTF does it have to do with md???) toolchain to work with markdown documents.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoSorry, I was talking about scientific writing, where you have to be able to produce PDF artefacts. Writing in markdown and converting to .tex is actually a quite popular way of doing that these days.
- crazygringo 2y agoBecause in my experience, the value of collaboration tools isn't versioning -- going back to an older version rarely happens. It's the suggested edits combined with comments sidebar right there in the document, where you can have whole back-and-forth asynchronous discussions. There's no obvious/easy way to have comment threads in markdown or in git. And while you could, in theory, implement suggested edits as commits on a separate branch waiting to be merged in, the workflow for that would be pretty horrible -- are you going to create a separate branch and commit for every single edit? Since small edits are generally individually accepted, rejected, or further modified.
- Symbiote 2y agoYou can already get most of the way there, as Pandoc supports reading the ODT or DOCX export from Google Docs reasonably well. I have this in my shell history: pandoc --from=docx --to=asciidoc --wrap=none --atx-headers --extract-media=img doc.docx > doc.adoc
- chrisfinazzo 2y agoStick downdoc on the end of that pipeline and you're done -- unless you prefer working in AsciiDoc, I guess. Not my thing, but you do you... https://github.com/opendevise/downdoc https://github.com/opendevise/downdoc
- Symbiote 2y agoAsciidoctor has been much better received by my colleagues, primarily for the built-in support of a few technical writing features — admonitions, non-trivial tables, crossreferences, etc.
- chrisfinazzo 2y agoMultimarkdown has similar features so far as I know, but it has the same problem as Markdown.pl: written by one person, with a bunch of spot fixes and so isn't really reproducible or extendible by anyone else without running into bugs.
- protortyp 2y agoI recently used Typst and their own collab solution for a paper we worked on. While some features are still lacking it was a pretty good experience overall.