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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

Prefer Asciidoc over Markdown. Easier to remember syntax, richer set of controls and more importantly - better tables. Tables in Markdown are a nightmare. Asiidoc is a lifesaver for tables. For big tables, columns can be specified as rows leading to sane reading.

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I like asciidoc because latex math is part of the standard and not something you may or may not get like with markdown. There are a couple of other nice things (like tables) too.

I think the complexity of asciidoc is probably why there are only a couple implementations though, which is a real bummer.

IMO Asciidoc tables can get messy quite soon, to the point that at that point I'll just use HTML.

Multimarkdown tables are fairly straightforward, no? From a blog post about the linear typewriters last year, a simple table (unformatted because I'm lazy.)

    input file | my score | article score | ratio
    -----------|----------|---------------|------
    stripped.txt | 5262321 | 5499341 | 95.7%
    s2.txt | 5510008 | 5499341 | 100.2%

    .Table Scores
    |===
    | input file | my score | article score | ratio

    | stripped.txt
    | 5262321
    | 5499341
    | 95.7%

    | s2.txt
    | 5510008
    | 5499341
    | 100.2%
    |===

And that's just two lines of four columns - I've got blog posts with 20 lines of 5 columns. It would be heartbreaking to type that in.

I vastly prefer adoc's tables because I don't need to concern myself with aligning anything to figure out what's what.

A fair concern. For me it doesn't work because the table headers aren't laid out the same way as the rows and that's just two ways of confusion.

prefer asciidoc because its a well defined standard and is just as simple to use as markdown.

and yes - tables are much nicer in asciidoc

I just ”shell out” to HTML for tables.

How do you make PDFs? When I’ve used html features I’ve resorted to weird tricks with WebKit but that’s really not great.

> How do you make PDFs?

I don't :D

I wish I had that luxury.

I mean, when I did have to make them I used dvips ... but that was a long time ago. And tables in LaTeX are no joke either.

HTML tables are hard to write, read, and edit though. If you want to make the document easily readable both as HTML and Markdown (quite useful for a README, I think) then it's not a very good option.

I agree, I've resorted to writing Perl to generate the tables in some cases.

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