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.
Also, read the second half of my other reply for the other reasons it was adopted.
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?
Did you implement an example for them, demonstrate, and get acceptance?
What was the resistance? How was it overcome?
- 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!"
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.
Aren't you describing a wiki?
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.
I’m teaching my children to write their school papers in markdown for similar reasons.
I use a github PR to provide feedback.