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If you're interested in adding LaTeX to that list, you might like to try Overleaf [1] -- it's an online collaborative LaTeX editor we built to try to lower the learning curve (I'm one of the founders).

It includes a rich text mode for easier collaboration with non-LaTeX users [2], and you can also write in Markdown if you like :) [3].

Feedback always appreciated if you do give it a try, thanks.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81

[3] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/501

Thank you so much for Overleaf, as a new user, its great!

I really like how easy it is to experiment with the LaTeX formatting (something I wasnt super familiar with) and immediately see the output.

I had someone send me their resume template on overleaf and it was super easy to get a similar product with my personal touch.

The only feedback I would have is it was a little awkward to do folders within folders (this was a few months ago) and I had to ken the "hey put a path separator in the name" before I got it.

Thanks for the feedback - great to hear you've been finding it useful and yes, improving the file tree is definitely on our list.

Good luck with your future projects!

Overleaf was invaluable while I wrote my thesis. Thank you!

Congratulations on your thesis -- it's a lot of work, and I'm glad Overleaf helped :)

Did you try org files ? Even if you're not into Emacs it might worth the try reading your needs

Pollen seems really cool.

Org mode format is great. Pandoc works with all of those formats, including org mode.

http://pandoc.org/

I've found that Pandoc [1] is a wonderful converter if you want to write in a future-proof format (like markdown) but also generate nice PDFs.

[1]: http://pandoc.org/

I've been writing daily notes in the same text file since 1996. Fascinating to look back through old entries.

Format is dirt simple: date alone on a line is the only special element. The main thing I really miss is the ability to scribble drawings inline.

I just use markdown for what it's good at and 'drop' to HTML for the stuff I can't do in 'plain' markdown.

Python has a lovely library for it and combined with jinja you can get a hell of a long way in a couple of hundred lines of python as a static site generator.

> Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, except when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.

I just did essentially the same, in reStructuredText.

The battle is so lost that I don't even bother fighting it, but there are many nice things about reST: you have to explicitly escape html to get it passed through as html (feature/bug), tables are easy, especially the list tables, I'm used to it (feature? bug?), ...

AsciiDoc seems the way to go then.

It's like DocBook with Markdown like syntax

Btw, AsciiDoc could be used with gitbook-cli. It's not Sphinx but still powerful enough for all kinds of documentation.

hmm..... having seen a bunch of demos of almost-compiling LaTeX produced by neural networks, I wonder if there's a good space for building seq2seq document format converters...

(also makes me wonder what style transfer from latex to markdown would look like; automatically convert your years-in-the-making research project into a snarky blog post!)

Plaintext / basic Markdown with an "organizer" like Ulysses [0] or Quiver [1] can serve just about all needs.

[0] https://www.ulyssesapp.com

[1] http://happenapps.com/#quiver

No Windows or Linux? Okay.

Ulysses (and probably Quiver too) can just give you a "pretty view" of your existing folder structure, and since it's all plaintext/MD you can work with your data on Windows/Linux just fine, and there's nothing keeping someone from makes similar apps on the other OSes.

I used to use OneNote for everything, until I moved to Macs... Not only there was no Mac version at first, OneNote STILL doesn't let you import old local notebooks into the Mac version.

With Ulysses/Quiver at least I know that what I write on the Mac will still be readable on Windows/Linux..

>With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.

And plain text is itself a nightmare to parse and do anything beyond reading it as a block.

How is it harder to parse than a PDF or a docx?

I mean compared to structured file formats like JSON, YAML, TOML, XML and whatever (including binary such).

Obviously it's not harder to parse than a PDF.

Uh, "plain text" is not a pair of words that I would use to describe "structured data" at all. I don't even know what someone would intend to mean in such a situation.

If someone told me they needed me to parse a "plain text" file, to me it sounds like they'd want me to provide some statistics on an unstructured text blob.

Free form text does have properties, such as byte length, character count, word count, line count, sentence count, paragraph count, and so on. Most of which is simply variations on whitespace delimiters.

But an individual plain text file... all on its own? Could be a shell script? Could be a newspaper clipping? Could be a dictionary file? Could be an array of XYZ vertices, edges and faces? Could be all of the above, and an email signature at the end?

Someone tells me: "here have this plain text object," and I presume it is a monolithic blob of ASCII, if I'm lucky, and maybe it's War and Peace or Moby Dick expressed in emoji if I'm not.

>Uh, "plain text" is not a pair of words that I would use to describe "structured data" at all. I don't even know what someone would intend to mean in such a situation.

Well, most would agree markdown is a plain text format for example, but it's not totally unstructured.

Still it's a bitch to parse compared to something like JSON.

I'd argue that it's hard to parse because it's so open-ended. E.g. Markdown is only one example of how to structure textual data in plain-text with additional "syntax".

Imagine it wasn't decided on Markdown. E.g.: I don't use markdown when making plain-text notes. I make it all hierarchical and indent using "- ". I.e. headings are top-level, sub-headings are indented by one, and so on. Eventually, you realize that all things can be represented as just lists of nested lists. No need for some arbitrary "heading" type, just nest it all based on the concept.

Certainly, but once you obey some conventions (generally accepted or your own), it's easy to parse and transform.

I'm building course notes right now for a college class using markdown & MathML/LaTeX, that i'll be hosting on Github pages for the students to browse. It's by far the best balance that I've come across yet.

That's.... pretty much my exact experience (oh, I get to add multiple years of latex use).

Html or plaintext is all I trust now. A nice editor on top of it and I'm good. If you have to do larger document writing, I recommend Madcap Flare.

Asciidoc

what, recommending just one more format to learn? I don't think that's what the parent post is looking for : )

Asciidoc/Asciidoctor is non-ambiguous (unlike Markdown), works with different workflows and unlike org mode you can use different editors, easy to learn (unlike LaTeX). ReStructured text is the second closest but there you have to have Python in order for it to be useful, so Asciidoc is the only one plausible universal text markup as I see it.

I couldn't have said it better.

restructuredtext?

I'm going to second that.

RestructuredText is very powerful, and has an official specification. Basically what Markdown is missing. Yet, it is plain text and easy to parse.

I like reStructuredText, but the format is grating compared to markdown. The two things I do the most are sectioning and links. Inline links are ok in rst, but I prefer markdown. Sectioning though is awful. I hate having to hold the damn == or -- or ~~ down and getting the length right. It's easier to parse when you read the plaintext, but makes me loath writing it. Most the time I deal with md or rst, they end up formatted anyway, which is the point IMO.

Personally I don't think sectioning is that bad, a little annoying when working with other people that don't do it, though...

   foo
   ======================

... the easy and built-in extensibility is a huge plus though, as is Sphinx and the pretty good output writers for many formats. Sphinx btw. works with Markdown, too.

Quite possibly my biggest annoyance with rST/Sphinx is the hanging toctree issue, and poor support for multi-format images/figures.

The 100 % offline search in Sphinx is somewhat of a mixed bag and doesn't always give good results, though it's fine for reference works.

obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/