Comment by ktta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktta | Hacker News Reader

Another closed file format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx.

A quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before)

All of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using Google Docs) try to tie the user as close to their eco-system as possible.

When ever I try to maintain documents for long term storage, markdown seems like the only good format. I've seen people talk about stuff like org-mode, etc, but they all lack the fluidity and the WYSIWYG nature of Google docs, docx etc. I'm talking about how markdown never actually stores pictures inside the document, but just links to them, and you'll have to use a specific application to view the rendered markdown, and a different one to edit or make new ones.

I'm interested to see that does everyone else use for documents? And please don't suggest docx+open/libre office. I'm still waiting for some of those applications to properly handle a big file and I don't want to wait so long for those applications to even open.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think I should clarify something. I'm looking for a WYSISWYG tool, like google docs/docx. I don't really have time to spend doing the edit->render->see where you went wrong->edit cycle. This really hurts productivity when you're editing large documents and increases the barrier for new comers. I do use LaTeX but only when I need ultra sharp looking documents with specific needs. I really like it, but only pull it out when I need to write a paper and want the output in PDF. Other times, it's really not worth the effort.

So formats which require me to render to HTML etc, are a no go. I'm looking into ASCIIDOC but even that looks like it's very similar to markdown. And by WYSISWYG, I mean I want to type, and press Ctrl+B to write in bold, and Ctrl+I for italic and right click to insert hyperlink and so on. Not use asterisks everytime whenever I want to make something bold. Sure it transparently to that in the background, but I shouldn't have to worry about it.

One of the problems is that people want different things from a "simple document format".

Some want rendering-agnostic structure, like Wiki / Markdown / Org mode, that emphasizes structure and text, with things like links, tags, etc.

Other want to print centered headers on level 1, and left-aligned for level 2, and body text with a particular font, with fragments in a different color, and pictures with text flowing around them, etc.

These two camps command different design goals. A format that makes one of these easy adds complications and edge cases to the other.

The funny thing is, the same people periodically need one tool and the other, and even want to mix them. Many of them would consider having two tools for these jobs superfluous, especially if paid. They'd rather bend an existing tool, because how hard it is to add spans of colored text? or collapsed sections? It's, like, a hundred lines of code!

Hence the modern office formats, tolerably doing a huge spectrum of things, none of them brilliantly, and hopelessly complicated.

I feel Latex can is the best tool that can both of these jobs simultaneously.

I'm pretty happy with pandoc markdown, compiled to PDF or HTML using LaTeX or CSS for styling, which achieves both of those design goals. But I also want to compose my first draft in a WYSIWYG editor and send it to non-technical users for editing (with tracked changes), so I do almost all of my writing in Word. It's the user interface, not the file format, that I find limiting.

I've been using Paper since October, and thus far it's been my favorite Markdown Editor. It's not perfect, but it does a great job of accepting inline markdown and then just getting out of the way.

Also, you can export from Paper to Markdown or docx. I've written a few of my github READMEs in Paper and then exported to Markdown and they've worked just fine.

The examples you've mentioned (ctrl-i, ctrl-b, insert hyperlink) all work just fine, as does pasting markdown directly into the editor.

-- I have nothing to do with Dropbox, except as a happy paying customer and a happy Paper user.

I've been playing with passing markdown+css file+image tree to: pandoc {options} -H file.css --self-contained. It base64 encodes the images directly into the HTML5. The css in file.css is wrapped in <style></style> and is inlined in the header. The result is a fat HTML file with all the basic bits to make an article included. Exact line: pandoc --standalone --toc -V "toctitle:'Title'" --self-contained --to html5 -H article.css -o file.html file.markdown. Image links in code: ![Some Server](images/some_server.png)\ <-- escaped space to force inline image.

For the longest time (5 or 6 years, way longer than Electron) I have been puzzled as to why there didn't exist a document format for offline websites/apps, that are basically a zip file of HTML+CSS+images+javascript.

That way you could build simple, easily distributable multimedia documents and web apps.

This is close, but I'm thinking cut out the web tools part. Do we really have to depend on HTML and CSS (or other XML based format which needs a web browser to view) to make and edit a simple word document? I cringe thinking of the bloat that is introduced when using CSS and javascript to view text+pictures.

The pandoc help section on "--self-contained" indicates that it can mostly handle your use case (minus the compression step).

I haven't used it in a while, but most browsers allow you to go File->Save, and it'll save everything in a contained folder structure that should be easily zippable. Including all linked images/CSS/JS, with their references fixed for local-consumption.

That is, until requireJS/AMD/angular/react/backbone/etc and those sorts of things started polluting the web. Thanks you JS developers.

IIRC Mozilla created such file format, and MS Explorer has its own proprietary version. They didn't caught on, though.

Isn't that basically Microsoft's compiled html (chm) files?

MHTML is an archive file of a webpage and its external resources.

Thanks for the reply. I could really see making great looking documents with this. Although the problem is we're using all these cli tools (I love them too) to edit them.

So the problem is when I try to edit them on a new computer or even online, there's no way for me to do it in most cases, and in when I actually can install packages for all that, there's some dependency management I have to do. One more thing, since the output in HTML file, I have to again use a full-featured(which means slow to open) web browser to render the HTML file.

I hear you on needing piles of CLI packages. Regarding the web browser, the pandoc HTML seems pretty basic, so even the lightweight GUI browsers will probably handle it correctly. Also, if you include the correct bits in each image link in the markdown, I believe the resulting HTML5 will render with your included image descriptions in a text-only browser.

Here[1] is the HTML 5 standard. It includes a lot of things that a word file would never need. You're correct about not needing a lot of the things that say a browser like chrome has. Can we still not achieve the same thing with something simpler?

[1]:https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

AFAIK it's all markdown and you can export your files as markdown. There's also an API available to export your paper docs as markdown.

Only export though? I can't just edit the files in place with emacs, which is my preferred way to edit anything? I don't mind if all the collaboration stuff was only visible with whatever dropbox editing UI, I'd just like the freedom to edit with whatever tool I wish to use.

> I'd just like the freedom to edit with whatever tool I wish to use.

How should whatever tool you're using handle the case when another person is editing the document at the same time as you?

I use AsciiDoc for my more complicated documents. It's a lot like Markdown, but with more options when I need them to do specific things with formatting my documents.

Docx is basically a zipped container for XML + embedded images. What if there was a .mz (zipped markdown) format that markdown editors would treat as a single file for the document + embedded materials?

textbundle.org is an attempt to standardize that. Not sure how much traction it has though.

You may want to try authorea.com - open format, based on Git, and it supports LaTeX and Markdown in addition to a WYSIWYG similar to Dropbox.

are you talking about HTML? w3c got it figured out, or do you mean LaTeX?

There is no HTML-container format, so you cannot create a multimedia HTML document (singular)

There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML

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