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Comment by michaericalribo | Hacker News Reader

Just to add here, the question is not “is markdown (or tex or binary strings or...) better”, but “can the person who determines whether I get paid open the file?”

The fiction publishing world is cutthroat competitive. Trying to use nonstandard tools / “breaking the mold” adds even more friction to success.

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I will find out the answer to this question hopefully later this year. :-)

But anyway, I do use Markdown and I have submitted to contests etc. that require Word formatted files. For the most part it's an nonissue. I can use Pandoc to export to Word, provide the reference file with the correct format, and boom, I'm done. None of the judges of my works so far have ever had any issues opening my files.

I agree the publishing industry will never accept Markdown. That's ok. I can use the tools I like and still produce what they need to do their part of the job.

I agree, and I draft my own fiction in emacs. The cost is lower to use my preferred editor, then do the post-hoc formatting adjustments once in Word.

For a novelist, though, the editing process is quite iterative: make changes, send them to your editor, they send it back with comments and inline track changes and so on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an advocate for using tools you're most comfortable with...whatever gets you writing! But these small things can throw a wrench in the process. It sure sucks to have to do edits in Word!

Good luck with the publishing project, though, it sounds like you're pretty far along!

Unrelated, but what do you write? (Feel free to contact me on Keybase if you prefer, username is in profile.)

I'm an author and an software engineer. I can see why Markdown could be slightly better for a writer - but not much better - and honestly it seems like a step down for an editor.

Primarily, all a writer does is write plain text. Probably less than 1% of sentences are anything other than plain text.

There's not a lot of headings or titles. There's not a lot of italics or bold text.

What else is there? What am I missing? What's the benefit?

Ha! This is a really interesting perspective—I think you're saying, "it's all plain text, so there's no advantage to using Markdown instead of docx".

I think others have an opposite view, but on the same grounds. The argument seems to be: it's all plain text, so docx is overkill, so markdown is more technically efficient!

There's some benefit to using the tool I know best (emacs, for me), so it's nice to use a "native" format that also gives me my usual keybindings, macros, etc.

But there's no doubt it just offloads the inefficiency to a different step of the process. I'm more comfortable with inputting text, but it requires post-hoc reformatting, and I'd have to use a different word processor for post-editor changes...

The "markdown is a more efficient solution from a technical perspective" argument doesn't hold a lot of weight with me...the practical overhead of docx is minimal, so unless you prize technical purity over all else, I don't think there _is_ a benefit.

The benefit is the rest of the pure text toolchain. Like being able to use Git. I can confirm, for example, how long a typo has existed in my book by looking at the Git history. Maybe that's a bit academic, but you get the point. I have the complete history of everything I've ever written.

Another example: because formatting is reified in Markdown, I can grep for it. Did I misuse italics? With one command I can find every single place where I used italics in my entire book. I don't think you can even do that in Word. Good luck reading a multi-hundred page manuscript to find all of the places you may have made the same mistake.

Another example: Word provides styles, but honestly, who has discipline to use them? Most people I know manually insert page breaks, centered text, and X number blank spaces at the top of a page to make a new chapter. In Markdown, all of my markup gets converted into Word styles automatically and then I can create a reference doc to apply the style I want. I'm writing semantically correct styles in my documents all the time with no additional effort.

Well, to be fair, MS Word maintains a full history of every edit that was made.

And, find-and-replace for specific formatting is supported out-of-the-box.

Finally, cmd-i / cmd-u / cmd-b are pretty easy default bindings, and setting up shortcuts for more intricate, specific styles is straightforward in Word.

I share your preference for using an efficient tool—I'm a die-hard md+git practitioner. But the "most people I know" argument is not a good basis for rejecting real, rich features in software that works well for other people.

I am also curious: why do you care about semantic correctness? It's OK if that's just your preference, but it's not something that moves the needle for me....I'm not sure why I should care!

(edit to add: my comment sounds glib and a little sharper that I intended. That wasn't my intent!)

> MS Word maintains a full history of every edit that was made

This is only true while track changes is on, correct? Like can I see the state of a docx as I was writing it last month/year?

I don't use Word so I can't say!

But if you cared about the history, why wouldn't you always turn them on by default? "Full history" in git is also an opt-in model for maintaining a history...

I think version history doesn't work the way you think. It seems to be supported when you use Microsoft's cloud storage product (which I do not use):

> Version history in Office only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-previous-ver...

Or alternatively you can sort of hack it with track changes, but it's not automatic and there is a long list of caveats. In short, track changes is really intended for a single round of changes on top of a base document, not for permanently tracking the changes on a document over its entire lifetime:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-previous-ver...

Now maybe a Word expert will come along and tell me how to do it properly. :-) But even if they do that sort of proves my point, which is that Word is a large, complex piece of software and even if it hypothetically supports some feature, doesn't make it intuitive or easy to use in that way. (Or that you won't hit a bunch of corner cases when you try to use it.)

I do stand corrected about the find-replace formatting, so thanks for that. But on the other hand, I don't think it really contradicts my point either.

To be clear, I do think Word serves its user base! For low- to moderate- tech savvy users, it's does exactly what it needs to. And I'm not saying everyone should switch to Markdown. But for those of us who have the technical chops to go beyond it, there are some real advantages to working with other tools that shouldn't be discounted.

Well said! Though, I would say that this statement is a good description of git, too:

> a large, complex piece of software and even if it hypothetically supports some feature, doesn't make it intuitive or easy to use in that way. (Or that you won't hit a bunch of corner cases when you try to use it.)

A takeaway I get from this entire conversation is that the real pain point is not the drafting stage, but the editing stage. The latter is (a) collaborative, with (b) non-technical stakeholders...there doesn't seem to be a good way to both use my favorite editor, AND play nicely w my editor's stack (or lack thereof).

Good thing I don't have an editor...that would require me to actually write things :D

You just sold everyone on markdown. This is the whole point. All the crap MS Word adds to support formatting and visual styles is in the way. With markdown you focus on the actual text. Exactly what an author should want to.

What exactly does MS Word add over markdown which matters to an author? I am talking about the writing experience. You could always export to docx.

Why would I want to write my first draft in a different tool than my subsequent drafts? Nobody cares about visual styles, but my editor sends back their thoughts with inline edits and comments in Word. It's so much easier to edit in Word. I'm a huge Markdown fan, but it raises the question:

What does Markdown get me that makes it worth switching to for the first draft only?

From your parent's comment, I think this is the key statement:

> what an author should want

That is normative / prescriptive attitude, and seems to gatekeep who gets called "an author."

On the other hand, I think the biggest challenges most writers have is getting words on (digital) paper, regardless of the software.

I am also unconvinced that there are any practical benefits (for me) to using Markdown in particular, instead of whatever is closest to hand and offers the least friction...use what works for you!

i am probably the wrong person to respond because the reason i prefer a plain text editor is that that's what i have been using for all my work until now.

i am not yet there in the process, but i won't be using plain text/markdown just for the first draft.

when i get back that word documents with comments from the editor, i'll look at that like a read-only copy, and actually make the required edits in that same plain text editor.

while it may be easier to make edits right in place in the word document, it is easier (for me at least) to keep a history of changes with plain text documents.

otherwise i'd agree with you. if you are going to end up editing in word, may as well start with editing in word. for me the goal is to avoid using word/libreoffice at all.

Many writers intentionally separate tooling to force workflows, even at the point of great inconvenience if it provides for an environment they feel is more conducive to writing. This is generally far more important than whether or not getting it into a format that editors can work with is extra effort or not.

Hemingway famously favoured pencils for his first draft and switched to typewriter for his second.

Gaiman and Stephen King uses pens for at least their first drafts. Gaiman expressly for the reason that he believes it force him to be more thoughtful and forces him to go back and rewrite the full book word for word rather than going back and forth to edit. King switched to pens after his car accident.

JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter with pen on loose sheaf paper.

Writing novels is intensely personal, to the point where writers will insist on specific brands of pens or specific models of typewriters. E.g. Danielle Steele has used 1946 Olympia's throughout her entire career.

A table of contents you don't have to manually maintain. Built-in interface to insert special characters you can't type with the keyboard. Automatic grammar checks. Auto-corrections. Macros. All of the above in one program instead of a hodge-podge of programs. Being able to send and receive documents from people with no conversion needed.

No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?

* Table of contents: solved by Pandoc.

* Inserting special characters: personally I don't find those "character choosing" windows to be very convenient. Hunt and peck is a slow way to type! Anyway, you can do this in Markdown with either Unicode (if you have the right keyboard) or you can write HTML escape codes (&tm; etc.)

* Automatic (grammar/spelling). I don't like check as I type, but sure. Anyway, Emacs provides this if I want it.

* Macros. Hello? Emacs? (Also, Pandoc has a scripting interface.)

I may not be published yet but I've written my own book. I've also published books for other people. I did both of those with a Markdown-based toolchain. It works.

Edit: Just to prove the point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692553916 . Go see for yourself how the book is formatted.

And in emacs, you can insert essentially any Unicode character with `C-x 8 RET`...add swiper and you're off to the races :)

Also, if emacs was good enough for Neal Stephenson, I'm sold...though I hear he uses Scrivener now!

The "inserting special characters" one is a bit of a "eh?" for most of us Mac users, I think, since most special characters can be typed using the Option key and the character chooser (which is indeed not very convenient!) is system-wide and should work in a native build of at least the GUI version of Emacs. But, yep -- Markdown and Word aren't the same categories of things. How comfortable your Markdown editing experience is depends on how comfortable your Markdown editor is.

(Also, I wrote a Markdown-to-ePub script, too! Although I don't think anything I've got up online uses it anymore.)

pandoc, emacs, and scripting are _not_ a realistic option for most writers. They're writers, not programming geeks.

I'm a Markdown fan, but really there _are_ better solutions for book writing that maintain the ease that Markdown brings. Things like ASCIIDoc.

"What does MS Word offer over Markdown" isn't a good question, because they're not the same thing -- Word is a program and Markdown is a file type. There's nothing that stops a Markdown-based editor from having a full set of features. I've very rarely felt that I was missing out on features when using iA Writer or Ulysses compared to a word processor, although occasionally I wished for either the kind of document juggling that Scrivener is so good at or actual full-blown text editor features like BBEdit. But I haven't reached for an old school word processor as my first choice as a composition tool in... probably 15 years. And I definitely do write a lot.

The most obvious WYSIWYG competitor for novelWriter is Scrivener, which is similar to Ulysses -- and also shares the limitation that it can only export to Word rather than import. Nevertheless, its testimonials page is filled with praise from people who arguably write more than I do. :)

Writing a table of contents is my formatters job, not mine. It takes place after both my editor and my proofreader have completed their jobs, at which point I don't touch the file any more. If you format your own, then you're already in an small niche.

Some people may need "special characters" they can't type, but I have keybindings for the characters I use.

Grammar checking and corrections is my proofreaders job, not mine. It happens after I've converted my document and sent it off.

Macros are supported in pretty much every editor I've ever used for plain-text. I use lots of macros, but exactly zero of them for my novels.

I don't need to send and receive documents with no conversion needed. I do one export when I'm done with my first draft, and then I edit and do one more export before handing it over to my proofreader. Then, sure, I review those changes in Librewriter. The proportion of my time that takes is tiny. It'd be nice not to have to, but I'd take that over having to work in a word processor during writing any day.

> No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?

As someone who has written several novels, that's how your comment came across to me. At the same time I know novelists range from the pen and paper type (e.g. Gaiman, King to give two examples discussed in this thread) up to wanting word processors with all bells and whistles - it's very much down to taste.

MS Word does add word processing. E.g. your straight quotes will be contextually converted to the correct left/right quote, your hyphens can become em-dashes, etc.

I write books in Vim. The way I work is that I do it all in plaintext until the final edit. Only after that do I add formatting (could be .docx or Markdown or whatever the editor expects).

What happens when your editor requests changes? How are those edits communicated to you, and how do you integrate them back into plaintext?

(Serious question—a big pain point for me is the choice between using my preferred tool to start, then switching to a bad tool later; or, using a bad tool the entire time)

All edits in plaintext on both sides until the final draft. Yes, I know this isn't the standard way of doing things but it isn't so much because I'm a Vim cultist or anything. It's only because I can yank, insert, and navigate the text so much faster than with something like Pages, MS Word, or Scrivener.

Another way that seems to work well for some writers and editors is a shared Google Doc.

This sounds silly but as an author myself it's extremely important that I know what the story looks like to a final reader while I write it. It's like dogfooding my own prose. Too many short paragraphs, or too many long ones, or strange gaps, etc. are much more evident to me in docx or scrivener or any other text processor.

I could never get over Markdown; Markdown doesn't show me the user experience of my own code(writing), while word and scrivener will show me instantly.

Consider a book like The Lord of the Rings. It has gone through countless revisions and corrections. With markdown and git you could track those changes and corrections over time.

Yes, you or I could...but Tolkien was much busier writing and world-building, and I seriously doubt George Allen & Unwin (the publishers) would have acceded to conditions on how the manuscript was sent to them!

Also - doesn't MS Word have revision history?

My favourite talk on this topic is "Emacs for writers": https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU

If you are working with plain text, use something that excels at working with text. I saw another of his talks, and how he works in Emacs is amazing.

Geez 99.99% of a Nobel is just plain text. MS Word adds no value. Getting plain text into MS Word is not rocket science.

The point of using markdown is that you got many tools which are superior is aiding in you writing process and organizing your text.

The final format is much less important than whatever aids your writing process.

I have tried using traditional word processors for writing novels and I cannot say they measure up to tools like Ulysses.

I'll tell her to let her editor know that. Lol.

> MS Word adds no value.

Word automates a lot of things in the editing cycle of a novel. Word's "Track Changes"/"Accept Changes" tools and the workflows they enable are by far the most common in a number of industries, but especially in edit workflows of most major publishers. That's why the Word format specifically is often requested/required, because people know and understand those tools and already have processes/workflows built around them.

The closest equivalent tools for plain text are source control systems and text diff/patch. Those tools are great (and arguably fit some definitions of "superior", especially in capturing history earlier in the process and keeping history longer after the process). They are also nowhere as ubiquitously installed as Word, and nowhere near as easily taught (or already known/understood) as Word in today's world.

Those "edit cycle" needs maybe aren't a huge reason to do the initial writing in Word, but they are certainly many steps above "no value", and thus the noted restriction that no matter what tool you use for the initial writing, if it doesn't have an easy Word export to get it started down the edit cycle path then it doesn't have an easy fit in today's publishing world.

This can be accomplished by exporting to PDF

Unless you're already a big-name author you rarely get to choose. Docx will generally be an option, and if you're lucky a few other formats.

I guess their editor can just cut and paste to Word if he really wants to make corrections.

> their editor can just cut and paste to Word if he really wants to make corrections

Is it sarcasm? I mean... make corrections/changes is what an editor does.

Hes, it was sarcasm. A write-only format is the worst way to send a novel to a publisher/editor.

How is a copyeditor supposed to manage a PDF? PDFs are generally a huge no-no in submissions. (Source: I write short fiction & my short fiction has been published.)

exporting to pdf is exactly what you don't want as an editor receiving files from a writer.

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