Madoko – a fast markdown processor for writing professional documents | Hacker News Reader

Madoko – a fast markdown processor for writing professional documents

madoko.net

113 pointsjamesadevine27 comments

Why does everything have to run inside a web browser these days? I like my text editors/word processors to be lean, lightweight and focused on one thing: editing text. Everything Madoko offers here (aside from WYSIWYG—which is overrated when you're trying to produce content) can be accomplished with pandoc+your text editor of choice (I've been using classic nvi lately, seems to work well for a distraction free environment and as a bonus is in the base install of OpenBSD).

I'm a basic bash and vim kinda cat too. Even then, I vastly prefer things in the browser for these 'flavor-of-the-week' type apps than many of the alternatives like:

  $ curl shady-url.com | bash, or
  $ tar xzf $(curl -O shady_url); make install, or
  $ npm install some-shady-package
  $ whatever other ruby/python/gem/egg/cmake/pathogen/etc.
  $ brew install cask github/shady-business
  $ docker pull ubunut+apt-get+myapp+postgres

Or hey, click this and forget about it in an hour. Ah. so much better.

While these web-app things may be nice for quickly trying out these programs, for actual long-term use on my machine and workflow besides all of the other programs, they don't stand up to the test unless they are truly revolutionary and needed.

According to item #10 on the page, you can download it and run it on the command line.

I'm with you on that. Even if I'm typing a long response in a web form I often write it in Vim and paste it onto the form.

I created a documentation CMS that functions as a Git repository allowing you to make the choice. The web editor is quite nice but power users will always prefer a proper editor.

https://www.graphia.co.uk

> Why does everything have to run inside a web browser these days?

This. I hate this trend, I even systematically use mpv/youtube-dl to watch videos out of the browser.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165395

The language Madoko has been written in is even more interesting: Koka. https://www.rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/koka/

Madoko is, to me, an absolute win.

Markdown for smooth text writing and a beautiful default visual expression combined with ultra-precise control for CSS and pdf visuals makes it a very powerful tool.

Examples of what can be made in Madoko:

- http://monetary-reform.info

- http://1984.surge.sh

- http://kortlink.dk/uumf (PDF)

The presentation aspect with reveal.js is the most interesting feature to me. I would prefer if there was just a package to do all this in VSCode or Atom, since I could already write and preview markdown there for documents.

This is why I'm always a bit wary of using Markdown for technical documents, Markdown is just too simple and you end up having to add on all these non-standard extensions to make it halfway usable. Add on to that the fact that Markdown isn't formally specified and has a bunch of ambiguities in what is specified, and I just feel like it's more trouble than it's worth.

Maybe I'm being unfair, this project does look very well done (the LaTeX integration in particular looks much better than most Markdown flavour's manage), I just don't really see what it improves on over something like AsciiDoc.

So they basically extended MD to do many of the things AsciiDoc does?

Though I like the reveal.js editor that looks clean and simple enough. Nowadays the old online editor seems PowerPoint (and that's not a compliment).

Hey, this is great. With concurrent editing/sharing I would use this to work on collective texts before translating to LaTeX for actual typesetting. Any plans to offer that in the future?

You dont need to convert to latex - you just include your latex mixed into the markdown. Example: https://github.com/mathiasrw/cointext_whitepaper/blob/master...

https://github.com/koka-lang/madoko

Sadly the example PDF is down. I wonder if it handles print stuff well. I wrote my thesis in markdown/html and bringing it to print was a pain (try to add non trivial page numbering via CSS...).

A video on Madoko from 2015:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/madoko-a-scho...

Nice work but if I have to know LaTeX syntax, why am I not writing in LaTeX?

To put it lightly, the syntax is odd. LaTeX doesn’t always pay off in the short term.

Same reason that LyX exists: LaTeX has a very steep learning curve, and is more intrusive than these alternatives.

Because setting up an environment where you can compile LaTeX - including common packages/classes - can be difficult.

You still need to setup latex to compile to PDF fra madoko

For actual writing, markdown gives you a way better flow.

What gives you the most fluent experience?:

    The house looked _very_ good. 

    The house looked \textit{very} good.

Flow, the first. Correctness, the latter.

/This/ should be italics, _this_ should be underlined.

Does it matter how fast it is if it isn't right?

Recommend Marp if you would like to make presentations using markdown.

https://yhatt.github.io/marp/

Some of the links on the page are broken. The presentation example is 404 and the HTML example for latex gets redirected to the author's profile page.

how can I install this? npm install -g madoko gave me a command line but nothing more, no installation instructions are found yet. would like to try it locally.

These look like the installation instructions, but I've not tried them myself: http://madoko.org/reference.html#sec-installation-and-usage

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