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> But Markdown doesn't compete with Word, really at all. There's no strong reason to frame them as opposites or to suggest that one can replace the other. Word is an editor, and Markdown is a spec. Word is wysiwyg, and Markdown is not.

I'd say the big difference between word processors (Word, LibreOffice, etc) and Markdown (or LaTeX) is that word processors are the IDEs of writing. They provide an environment and tools for not just entering your text and formatting it, but also tools for helping you create your content and manage it and work on it collaboratively.

> Word is simultaneously an horrific beast and a beautiful program, but the list of features Word has that Markdown doesn't support is probably 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than the list of features Markdown even has. Word can do everything Markdown can do, but not the other way around, even if you allow for arbitrary HTML (which is cheating)

The amazing thing about Word (more so in earlier editions...it's not quite as good at this currently) is that they tossed in nearly everything that any given user needs, which resulted in a bazillion features since different users need different things, but somehow managed to make it so that you can mostly ignore the features you do not need.

Usually the kitchen sink approach results in a program that is totally unusable by nearly everyone.

Is there a document spec out there that is more feature-full than Markdown, but isn't Latex?

Is it even possible to create such a spec and not end up re-creating Latex?

Asciidoc and restructuredText both have more features, stronger specifications [1].

reStructuredText has strong official support for extensions, including regular syntaxes in the language for using extension points consistently. That power alone makes it suitable for a lot of domain-specific documents, which is why IMNSHO a lot of the better software documentation is in reStructuredText rather than Markdown.

[1] Don't forget that for Markdown the only "official" spec for that name is a blog post and a Perl script. CommonMark is very well specified now, but is A) surprisingly quite recent despite the proliferation of Markdown usage, and B) technically a forked specification and "not official" and not allowed to use the name "Markdown" by the original author/developer.

The one advantage I saw over markdown vs rsT, say, was that documents with markdown looked good when viewed in Vim as well.

But when I'm including code in a doc I much rather prefer rsT, because I can specify the code type so the syntax highlighter doesn't have to guess about the language.

There are Vim syntax highlight scripts for rST, but they've never been included in the base install like Markdown.

This is the one I used for years, I believe:

https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=973

Looks like several people recommend this script:

https://github.com/dhabyx/riv.vim

Does Leanpub Markua (http://markua.com/) fit into your requirements?

Asciidoc?

It totally competes with Word for some documents. Of course there are documents that are possible in Word but not Markdown, and equally there are documents that are better to write in Markdown (e.g. Readmes). But there is a decent amount of overlap for documents that are basically lightly formatted text plus pictures.