Madoko – Write full-blown academic articles in Markdown

Hehe, I had the same idea for my master thesis. A asciidoc academic paper editor.

Still not finished it, since I wanted to make it realtime collaborative.

> GitBook has great TeX support

You probably want to update your website in that case: "Markdown, books are written using the markdown or AsciiDoc syntax. TeX support is planned."

Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize how much improvement has been made to GitBook, glad to try it again for my manuals.

A couple questions:

Your website talks about GitHub. Is it specific to GitHub or does it work with any Git repository?

What if you shut down? How do I continue to produce my book/paper?

How does your tool handle cross-references to #include'd pages? I have some home-grown tools that basically use a C++ preprocessor to assemble one big Markdown file from per-chapter or per-section chunks. What I struggle with (to do elegantly) is having robust cross-references, and to keep header levels consistent (e.g. when you include a section that itself has headers inside a h1 or inside a h2, you'd want the section's headers to become h2 or h3, respectively).

Do you have any support for reviewing, in a way similar to Word's 'Review' (comments and tracking addition deletions)? Using version control and branches is not OK, because non-software people cannot wrap their heads around it (just getting them to write in anything but Word is already a big enough hurdle...)

Do you have a proposed workflow to work with formulas? Inline TeX (or LaTeX) is again a no-go, it's too finicky to get right for people who don't have Edit/Compile/Preview Stockholm syndrome (bitter? me? nah). What I'd settle for is a separate file for each formula, and a graphical editor that can edit those files. A somewhat convenient desktop-based editor that'd give an overview of everything would be better (so having some way to start EqualX from your desktop tool would be enough).

Love this idea, might copy my current novella on the web (http://www.flailfast.com/) over to your platform to see how it looks. Out of curiosity: any chance you guys might integrate bitcoin donations/payments in addition to USD?

See also RMarkdown. It also has very good support for TeX equations, plus inline R code, and it uses Pandoc behind the scenes to handle multiple ouput formats (even .docx!) as well as bibliography. The big caveat for now is poor support for internal cross-references.

+1 for Madoko as it's free and Gitbook is not. I can use Madoko to create and publish my content and keep 100% of the income unlike Gitbook that takes a cut.

You also might want to take a look at PollPub: (http://pollenpub.com)

Discussed here on HN previously: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030585)

This reinforces some ideas that have been percolating in my brain for about two years. Between Gibook, PollenPub, and now Madoko it is now apparent that for the first time in its existence LaTeX is getting some competition.

What LaTeX gets right is that it produces beautiful structured academic-type (references and figures and such) documents. What it gets wrong as Gruber's Markdown has shown us is that the basic units of text should look like text and trigger markup through whitespace and intuitive but ultra-minimal markup such that without a processor it looks like an anally retentive writer produced the document. It codifies ascii practices. It's one of those ideas that until it happens you'd never think of it but afterwards you're going, "of course!". Besides Python and Markdown, do any file formats work this way?

I'm not going to make a Steve Yegge type predication but if I were I'd say that some form of scholarly markdown with multiple toolchain implementations (with git integration) is going to oust LaTeX as the structured document tool of choice. Be interested in what others have to say on the matter.

I wouldn't recommend org-mode for writing professional documents. It is more unstable than any other major piece of software I've used. I use it daily, but not for writing. Things get changed in each release, the documentation is rarely in sync, and in a lot of cases major changes are not documented at all.

I learned the hard way. I wrote some presentations using org-mode. Then they changed the exporters without updating the documentation. It would be especially problematic to write an academic article in org-mode, because you might have to return a year or two later, and that's not when you want to find out how much has changed since you last worked on the paper.

I would highly recommend org-mode for writing documents and papers. I'm an academic, and have been using org-mode for the last 4 years as part of the paper writing process.

One of the best features of this pipeline is the fact that I can write a large chunk of the document whilst conducting research. I can jot down notes, caveats, schedule TODO items etc. and just tag the bits I want for my own reference as 'noexport', so that they don't make it into the exported tex or pdf document.

Another great feature is that I can embed code for producing tables/figures all within the document and specify whether I want the code or result or both to be included.

Finally, once I am happy I have most of the document the way I want it, I export to tex to deal with the final tweaks to finesse things -- spacing for the entire document, fine-grained adjustment of figure formatting.

This ensures that I have all the information that went into constructing the document and allows me to deal with various venue-specific constraints like submitting a source archive, or pdf as necessary.

Here are some resources for getting started with this:

- https://github.com/vikasrawal/orgpaper/blob/master/orgpapers...

- http://draketo.de/english/emacs/writing-papers-in-org-mode-a...

- http://www.clarkdonley.com/blog/2014-10-26-org-mode-and-writ...

Actually, it was my mistake, it's https://www.madoko.net (it's not working without www).

Could someone correct it?

This is the problem if you want to publish. A lot of journals want .docx or Latex files, not PDFs, and they will simply reject submissions that don't comply with their requirements.

It would be nice if journals would accept Markdown, but frankly I don't expect that to happen anytime soon.

I wrote my master's thesis in overleaf about a year ago, because my laptop was starting to break down and I needed a solution that allowed me to easily switch between university computers without having to constantly set-up my workspace on each individual PC. That was before the rich content editor was implemented, but I loved the experience nonetheless. The whole thesis was, next to my research, an exercise in cloud-based software. VM's on Cloud9, Code repo on github and my text editor on overleaf. Thanks a lot for making it available to a poor student like me!

I hadn't heard of paper-now. I really like what they've done with the sidebar.

My only complaint is that I'd imagine reading academic articles in an ultra-thin sans-serif font might get tiring after a while.

I don't understand what you mean about lacking math support. I am writing math exercises using asciidoctor right now, as it integrates with Mathjax.

I would highly recommend asciidoc over markdown for scholarly work in succint plain text. Markdown is limited in its capabilities by design, as evidenced by all the different flavors of Markdown extension. It's what I would use to write an e-mail or blog post. Asciidoc, in the design of the language, anticipated extension and post-processing and has better support for using it as part of a complete document processing toolchain. After all, it's just syntax sugar for DocBook XML.

I concur -- do any of the markdown environments listed above accept imported .cls latex style files? Would they even be compatible?

It seems like this would be essential for writing research papers according to a conference's template. If so, I would definitely use....

Is Madoko a SAAS app? If so I'll note another problem - madoko.net is currently timing out when I go to access it; any data inside is stuck there for the duration.

On the Markdown+LaTeX note, I wrote my own Markdown parser (https://github.com/etherealmachine/markdown) to drive my github.io site (https://etherealmachine.github.io). Basically it's what you describe - easy mixing of Markdown+LaTeX to construct nice looking HTML.

I written TeX embedded in markdown the time with Pandoc for reports and papers. It's much easier than writing all TeX.

MathML is not a full replacement for TeX, and if we are talking about actual publication of papers/books rather than web content then neither HTML nor MathML are really up for the job.

>Perhaps someday there will be computer programs where you can write things without typing in funny codes.

You mean like ms word or open office ?

The Madoko document states that it implements different flavors and extends it slightly.

> Madoko is fully compatible with basic Markdown syntax and passes the entire test suite. It also implements most extensions, like Github flavored markdown, PanDoc, Markdown Extra, and multi-markdown, and it adds quite a few features itself to make it really useful for writing academic and industrial documents.

Have you considered pandoc? That allows to reduce it to md → pandoc → pdf, and in my experience pandoc generates much better PDFs (working links, etc.)

Can you do LaTeX on Typora?