Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

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> slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing

It's a bit of a matter of perspective.

The distinction between looking at a document in markdown versus Word is a bit analogous to the distinction between looking at a movie in its textual form as a screenplay versus looking at a movie as a piece of video: Text is capable of abstraction in a way that video is not.

In the screenplay, it might say "table", but when the director translates it to video, the director will have to decide: What kind of table? What design? What period? What texture? Is there anything on the table?

None of these decisions matter to the construction of the story, so, for a screenwriter, it would be very distracting if they had to make all of those decisions just to be able to get "table" committed to the medium.

In Markdown you worry about text and nothing but text. But Word shoves a particular font in your face as soon as you're laying down the first letter, so, if you don't like Word's choice of fonts, you can either let it annoy you throughout the project, or you can start worrying about fonts right then and there, which will be a distraction. If you write Markdown in a code editor, then, presumably, you've already set up the code editor in a way that doesn't annoy you. And then your future self (or someone else entirely) can worry about the font.

It's worth noting here (even though I also use vim/markdown/typst, and Word is a thing of the past) that markdown does say something more than "just the text".

It puts the header notation and style (like italic, etc) in-line. So does Typst or LaTeX, and I can't think of any typical stand-off examples for headers and such, but it does muddy the text in-line in that sense. It typically doesn't really slow down the writing, but if you're writing \# as comments for code, then don't have those wrapped in \`\`\`, you can get some problems.

We collaboratively write screenplays in markdown (actually fountain but its markdown plus some screenwriting stuff) and save them into Dropbox.

pandoc and some other tools turn those scenes into a full screenplay.

I know you're just font as an example, but doesn't your markdown editor also shove a font in your face? You can adjust default behavior in Word just as well as in another editor.

Anyway, to work within your analogy, I would say that Word lets the write do a bit of a 'mockup' of the set with nearly 0 effort. Like "I want a table here", so 2-3 clicks and you have it. Then you can "let the director" take your mock up and flesh it out properly later. As a writing, it helps me to see the mock up of the product as a go, but I want that mock up to be effortless. And as I said above, I do some work up front to make sure that Word's mock up looks good (or good enough).

...and that's the problem. You can easily get distracted by the look of the words on the page. Is the heading big enough, centered, got enough white space around it. By the time you've faffed about with that, I'm onto my second or third paragraph of content.

Obviously everything that puts text on a screen puts a font in the user's face. But Word also presents you with styles, which make what you see changeable from the whitespace on up. Not only can one paragraph look different than the next, one word in a paragraph can look different from the word following it.

It's true that many document elements, such as tables, are easy to create in Word. This puts it over the edge into desktop publishing territory. In itself, that's not especially a bad thing, especially if your target is a printed file or a PDF. That still makes it a publishing tool, not especially a writing tool.

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