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Comment by isarat | Hacker News Reader

Initially when Paper was launched I tried and left the product quickly. I was using Quip a lot for my work as it's more developer friendly and easy to manage.

I use Paper more and more these days with my team though we are into Google for Work. Google Docs is a tough cookie and an office replica.

Those who are in to markdown, they would hardly go back to anything else for formatting. The only catch with markdown is about creating tables Dropbox paper has nailed it pretty well.

The product is more pleasing for eyes with better typography, cleaner design and user experience. There's no friction to write. The people who collaborates are more productive easily review and feedback. Also it's more developer friendly with quick emojis with ":" shortcut.

Finally nothing beats the simplicity of Dropbox Sharing.

The product has lot more opportunities to grow. Expecting more integrations in the coming days.

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I've been using it since October, and I agree with all your points.

The biggest draw for me has been how quickly I can throw together a relatively well formatted doc without thinking much about it. Using inline markdown for headers and basic text formatting is fantastic, and I agree that the table implementation is the best I've used with any markdown-based tool.

I really appreciate the inline google maps, which has been great for planning trips. One welcome addition would be the ability to include a single map with multiple "pins", as having multiple maps on a single page can get pretty untenable as a doc grows. I've tried using links from custom google "My Maps", but that doesn't work (yet?).

I'd love to be able to add other extensions, like yelp review lookups or gist lookups. Maybe not as embeds but as "paste lookups", where pasting a url would create a pre-formatted paragraph or table in the doc (just like how pasting a map url embeds the map).

Ditto, I was lucky enough to try out the beta a year ago, and since then, I've been using it more and more compared to Docs or even text files (for event planning, side projects, server docs, etc).

The markdown integration, especially for inlining code, is awesome and what Docs should have been. Being able to quickly make a checklist has also change my note taking behavior and I almost never use straight up text files or specific list apps anymore.

That said, they recently changed their UI to hide the starred docs from the side bar which really makes them harder to find, and I actually find the inline dropbox file links/tables fidgety. But all in all, it's pretty awesome at reducing the friction between mind to note.

This has been my experience too, but paper's LaTeX rendering has been the killer feature for me.

Wow, that was completely unexpected. What a nice hidden gem.

> The only catch with markdown is about creating tables Dropbox paper has nailed it pretty well.

Agreed. Writing Markdown in anything else, I often open up Numbers and generate my spreadsheet there with formulas, etc, then export to CSV, then use a CSV to Markdown table converter that fully pads each column to be the same width. Probably an opportunity to optimize this further, but it takes < 1 minute and works better for me than writing Markdown tables of any complexity by hand.

> The product is more pleasing for eyes with better typography, cleaner design and user experience.

My favorite feature is being able to highlight text and Cmd-V to insert a link automatically.

Do you still use Quip at all? Paper looks nice, but I don't see any reason to switch from Quip.

Quip is a great product. I don't use it these days. I like everything about Quip except it's unconventional formatting shortcuts. I have tried various markdown based tools both mobile and web and finally I found Paper is appealing and strikes a balance between visual appeal, share and collaboration. Paper also syncs very small chunks of text (sentence level?) and it reduce conflicts a lot. Though I have used multiple tools for collaboration, the current version of Paper and Google Docs tops the list with my team.

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