Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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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!"

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.

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

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