Ask Slashdot: Do You Use Markdown and Pandoc? 204
BartlebyScrivener writes "I am a author, screenwriter, law prof, and a hobbyist programmer. I love MacVim and write almost everything in it: Exams, novels, even screenplays now that Fountain is available. I use LaTeX and WordPress and so on, but several years ago I discovered Markdown and the wonderful Pandoc. I searched Slashdot expecting to find lively discussions of both Markdown and Pandoc, but found nothing. Do Slashdotters look down their noses at these tools and do their work in HTML and LaTeX? I can't imagine computer geeks using Word instead of their favorite text editors. If not Markdown and Pandoc, what tools do Slashdotters use when they create documents that probably need to be distributed in more than one format: HTML, PDF, EPUB or perhaps even docx?" And then there's DocBook, LyX, and a host of other markup languages. What do you use, in what context?
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
I use the Rmarkdown flavor of markdown.
Scrivener (Score:5, Informative)
If you're writing a novel, a tool like Scrivener is a lot better than a text editor of any particular sort. It's designed for writers and makes it easy to do things like keep track of and organize all your notes, which if you're writing a novel is going to be far more important than whatever command is used to change the font.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)
LyX for reports and paper writing, with some raw LaTeX sprinkled in. I have a short python script that can merge multiple documents so I don't have extremely long bulks of content.
\input{file.tex} is your friend, it's basically the latex equivalent of the include statement in many languages. It's particularly nice if you have a simulation, gnuplot etc. generating a splash of latex that you want to integrate in the full paper.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Informative)
Markdown, Pandoc, and Vim/MacVim are my primary working tools for writing documentation.
I believed "Markdown and Pandoc" to be a work of 16th century French literature. By Alcofribas Nasier, is it not?
Re:not about CPU limitations, it's about grep + Em (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you're doing. You can't use grep, specifically, but you can search by regular expression in LibreOffice.
That's one way to slice it, but not the only way. I think publishing has an unhealthy relationship with LaTeX. Markup languages have come a long ways since 1980. Why are we so stuck on this one? Another language that is (1) more human readable (2) easier to machine parse (3) renders to equal or better quality (4) is wysiwyg friendly, should be quite possible.