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Comment by ktzar | Hacker News Reader

Pandoc is such an amazing piece of software. I used it to format my novel and made it part of a GitHub action to produce all the formats I required. I wasn't aware of templates, but some look really sleek.

I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.

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You may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.

For the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else.

I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.

For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

Right, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever.

Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.

Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.

This is more of a utopia than expecting the average office drone to learn emacs.

And if you define shortcut keys for your styles it's as quick to type as markdown.

This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc.

Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.

Having handled Word documents a few times in my years, oh, how I wish this was true.

Building my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning.

My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.

I started maintaining mine in plain text, no markup at all, 20 years ago and try to use it wherever I can. My favorite employer, a startup, liked it. Regrettably most companies these days lack a sense of humor.

I'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.

WYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality.

Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.

You should be aware that pandoc markdown has extensive non-standard additions to the language to make it usable.

If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.

pandoc has infinitely many devices for including various commands. A lua filter - to take one standard example - can manage basically anything you cook up. The going AIs can write them for you and your triggering syntax at the drop of a hat. Inter alia, you can write your restructured text in markdown and include bits like this.

Here is normal Pandoc Markdown text.

```{=rst} .. note:: This is a native reStructuredText directive! Pandoc will not parse or change this text. It goes straight to the rST output writer. ```

Back to normal Markdown text.

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