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Comment by socialdemocrat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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I may not be published yet but I've written my own book.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.

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.

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.

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