4 ms·

I know about the lack of tech-savvyness of most humans, but isn't Markdown and Pandoc—if you slam a GUI in front of it—covering the needs of 99% of users? Gran

by Pooge 1y ago

I know about the lack of tech-savvyness of most humans, but isn't Markdown and Pandoc—if you slam a GUI in front of it—covering the needs of 99% of users? Granted, when you need formatting, like for a formal letter, you use a template someone made but this is not what most people use Word for. And don't get me started on "people wouldn't understand how to put things in bold or italics"; they can barely use Word anyway. Might as well use something much simpler. Office "productivity" suites are over to me.

n8cpdx 1y ago
If you have such little regard for formatting that markdown suffices, you also don’t care about the difficult edge cases of docx.
carlosjobim 1y ago
WordPad, Notepad, or TextEdit is already included on the computer and perfectly fine for most writing and printed communication.
thangalin 1y ago
* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html * https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzPIoWZMKu_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... Here are some of my Markdown documents: * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf (99% pure) * https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_Design https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_... * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdown-part-8/jekyll-hyde.pdf https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow... A lot is possible with Markdown, especially with pandoc extensions.
- dv35z 1y ago
  (1) These look great - I saved the Impacts so I can keep reading it later. Can you share what the background/reason is for this document? (2) Hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction. I often take notes with clients in Markdown, and then after the call, do some cleanup. At that point, I would love to export it as a slick-looking PDF, and also HTML which I could paste into Apple Mail. I've done a few experiments with Markdown --> Pandoc --> HTML, but I started to realize I would need to dig deeper into Pandoc, figure out its HTML templates, create CSS. And wasn't sure if I ought to be doing Markdown-->HTML-->PDF. My ideal "flow" would be something like... pandoc 2025-07-18_Client1_Topic.md --style "Client1.css" ---output 2025-07-18_Client1_topic.pdf --output 2025-08.18_Client1_Topic.html When digging around in Pandoc, I also got the impression I would need to learn Tex formatting. I haven't figured out a "stack" on this topic, so thought you might have ideas. Currently, I am using Obsidian for taking notes. Then I use the "Copy as HTML" 3rd party plugin to copy my Markdown notes as basically themed HTML. I then open up MacOS TextEdit, on Rich Text mode, and paste that in. I might do a bit of text formatting here, clean out [ ] markdown links, etc. Next, I copy & paste from TextEdit to Apple Mail. I sometimes color the headings manually, and other basic formatting. Here I'll add the "Hello, " and "Sincerely" wrap around the notes, and send. I'll then check my iPhone Mail to make sure the mail looks OK on Dark Mode. Seems like a huge gap in the "note taking" tooling, but I'm hoping that I'm just ignorant of a few solid tools that can handle this workflow: "Take notes on a call, send them nicely formatted to client in email / PDF" Thanks for any ideas / suggestions you can share! // JRO
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    cmark is an easy to build C project that reads markdown (commonmark, but close enough) that I also write in obsidian, and writes it as xml or html. You can probably automate some of that conversion process, e.g. with xslt, though I'll admit that's an acquired taste.

by Pooge 1y ago

n8cpdx 1y ago

If you have such little regard for formatting that markdown suffices, you also don’t care about the difficult edge cases of docx.

carlosjobim 1y ago

WordPad, Notepad, or TextEdit is already included on the computer and perfectly fine for most writing and printed communication.

thangalin 1y ago

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html * https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzPIoWZMKu_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... Here are some of my Markdown documents: * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf (99% pure) * https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_Design https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_... * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdown-part-8/jekyll-hyde.pdf https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow... A lot is possible with Markdown, especially with pandoc extensions.

dv35z 1y ago
(1) These look great - I saved the Impacts so I can keep reading it later. Can you share what the background/reason is for this document? (2) Hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction. I often take notes with clients in Markdown, and then after the call, do some cleanup. At that point, I would love to export it as a slick-looking PDF, and also HTML which I could paste into Apple Mail. I've done a few experiments with Markdown --> Pandoc --> HTML, but I started to realize I would need to dig deeper into Pandoc, figure out its HTML templates, create CSS. And wasn't sure if I ought to be doing Markdown-->HTML-->PDF. My ideal "flow" would be something like... pandoc 2025-07-18_Client1_Topic.md --style "Client1.css" ---output 2025-07-18_Client1_topic.pdf --output 2025-08.18_Client1_Topic.html When digging around in Pandoc, I also got the impression I would need to learn Tex formatting. I haven't figured out a "stack" on this topic, so thought you might have ideas. Currently, I am using Obsidian for taking notes. Then I use the "Copy as HTML" 3rd party plugin to copy my Markdown notes as basically themed HTML. I then open up MacOS TextEdit, on Rich Text mode, and paste that in. I might do a bit of text formatting here, clean out [ ] markdown links, etc. Next, I copy & paste from TextEdit to Apple Mail. I sometimes color the headings manually, and other basic formatting. Here I'll add the "Hello, " and "Sincerely" wrap around the notes, and send. I'll then check my iPhone Mail to make sure the mail looks OK on Dark Mode. Seems like a huge gap in the "note taking" tooling, but I'm hoping that I'm just ignorant of a few solid tools that can handle this workflow: "Take notes on a call, send them nicely formatted to client in email / PDF" Thanks for any ideas / suggestions you can share! // JRO
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  cmark is an easy to build C project that reads markdown (commonmark, but close enough) that I also write in obsidian, and writes it as xml or html. You can probably automate some of that conversion process, e.g. with xslt, though I'll admit that's an acquired taste.