Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

Advice to the author:

This is a subject I am interested in, so I began your article eagerly, but had to stop about halfway through out of frustration. Please consider these as the constructive suggestions that I intend them to be:

Think about the story you want to tell. Maybe make an outline or diagram, marking at which points you will introduce which facts.

Example: For some reason something called Commonmark is abruptly mentioned, with a link to spec documents that would seem to be of only technical interest. What is this, and how is it connected to anything else?

Do enough research so that you know the highest peaks in the landscape. Why describe the foothills and take no notice of the prominent mountaintop right in front of us?

Example: the bits about the comics were fascinating. But where is Pandoc? I don’t think I’m guilty, here, of demanding that you write the article I would have written. But Pandoc is the application of Markdown. It turns Markdown into a way to author HTML, TeX, PDF, Office formats, and a lot more. It‘s huge.

Anyway, I like the look of your site (but agree with others that you should not hijack browser shortcuts).

I feel like pandoc is kind of like a secret club.

Once you know about pandoc, you orient all of your prose around it, because it's so powerful and useful.

But before you use it, the common opinion is "oh that sounds nice", not "oh let me build all of my workflows around it".

It is incredible how far markdown, sed and pandoc (with filters) can take you!

I've made websites with breadcrumbs, validated inter-document links and images, on and on; mostly pipelines with sed and pandoc.

All of my non-source-code homework in college went through pandoc, and was persisted as markdown source. It makes for clean diffs, and great version history.

Anyway. Give pandoc a try if you haven't already.

I’m with you.

And it’s true that’s it’s hard to take account of your own perspective. It’s possible to write a kind of story of Markdown and not make Pandoc a big part of it. But it seems like a glaring omission to not even mention it. It‘s what makes Markdown a real lingua franca, what gives it real power.

One of the prouder moments in life was convincing a legal team to convert a folder of Word docs to Markdown, check them into GitHub, and set up a CI/CD pipeline to convert them to PDFs to sharing.

That sounds like quite an accomplishment. At this point I don’t even think I would try.

Hard parts:

- It's Markdown, not Word

- Finding an editor that felt comfortable. (BTW, iA Writer is awesome for this.)

Easy parts:

- "You never have to care about formatting again!"

- "Two people can edit stuff at the same time and we can work out the differences later, instead of playing the 'who has the most recent version?' game."

- "Look, you just write text and a nice document with logos pops out the other side, and all of the documents look nearly identical without even trying!"

- "Git shows you the full history of every line of this file."

- "Hey, cryptographic signatures you can use to irrefutably prove the history of the document!"

- "This 'pull request' thing in GitHub shows you exactly the changes you made, like 'track changes' except they're all in one place!"

Seconding iA Writer. I especially enjoy the focus and editing modes.

The easy parts are what make it a selling product.

I'd love to see "github for non-developers", that is little more than a markdown-app, with a thin wrapper around some git server and pandoc.

Most CMSs implement all the hard stuff (version control, document generation) themselves, but exposing some of the "knobs" of pandoc/markdown/git and letting users run amok is kind of all you need to do, imo.

Confluence is kind of like this, but limited to the production of web pages.

The idea had crossed my mind.

> I'd love to see "github for non-developers", that is little more than a markdown-app, with a thin wrapper around some git server and pandoc.

Aren't you describing a wiki?

Sort of. (See my last sentence in the above sentence, about how “confluence is close”).

Wikis are limited to rendering information in a webpage format. The benefit of pandoc is that you can render it in any format you like, with arbitrary filters and styling.

So you can display the content in a webpage, but you can also render it into PDFs with full legal headers and footers, and footnotes with links, to be physically printed and mailed to people.

It’s a level of abstraction once removed from a wiki.

Nice!

I’m teaching my children to write their school papers in markdown for similar reasons.

I use a github PR to provide feedback.

This is a great idea.

Was Markdown really sufficient for you? I’ve tried to do this for a contract workflow, but always needed something like Asciidoc to get sufficient internal references, header numbering, tables, etc

So far. Pandoc’s Markdown has been sufficient to the job.

> One of the prouder moments in life was convincing a legal team to convert a folder of Word docs to Markdown, check them into GitHub, and set up a CI/CD pipeline to convert them to PDFs to sharing.

Why would you want to do that?

I mean, I don't understand why would anyone have to have and maintain a CICD pipeline just to be able to share a PDF.

For a PDF? No way! For a whole set of PDFs sharing the same template, some containing auto-generated data and with builds triggered by external events? Oh yeah!

Also, read the second half of my other reply for the other reasons it was adopted.

> For a PDF? No way! For a whole set of PDFs sharing the same template, some containing auto-generated data and with builds triggered by external events? Oh yeah!

You do not need a full blown CICD pipeline or git or anything at all to do that. Even LibreOffice, of all things, has doc templates and doc includes.

Hell, have you ever heard of TeX/LaTeX? People have been using it for decades for the same effect. You write the text, generate the doc, and you're set.

There's no need to go all-in on a resume-driven-development rampage. I mean, why on earth would anyone force any cleric worker to read up on GitHub Actions just to be able to send a report? You can't really justify that, can you?

K

It's a fascinating achievement! I, and others at my org, want to do this for technical writing. Some want LaTex -- others Markdown -- so we must answer that question first.

Did you implement an example for them, demonstrate, and get acceptance?

What was the resistance? How was it overcome?

Author here, appreciate the feedback! I got caught up a bit in the story of the inspiration behind Markdown (email for Markdown, typewriters for Textile), what I'd assumed was competition between Textile and Markdown (when it turned out they were more connected that you'd think just by seeing two "competing" standards on the market), and how this standard of sorts in Markdown both came from all these inputs but then was flexible enough that everyone can write how they prefer and also that others can take the Markdown idea and run with it and make their own thing.

Pandoc would have absolutely been worth mentioning; that's definitely more on the modern look at how Markdown itself got remixed and taken further, but definitely relevant.

Thanks. I know that this kind of article, trying to untangle the threads of a complicated history, is not easy to write.

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