Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).

    Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Man, I’ve written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.

      There’s a learning curve, but once you get going, it’s so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It’s extra work, but worth it, imo.

        • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          Because it isn’t doc is docx.

          Publishers are pissy about such things. Even self publishing (which is what I do now), the various outlets still have limits to what they will use. Amazon accepts something like three file formats, including their own, and pdf isn’t on the list.

          I could just do pdf for directly giving them away to people, but even then, epub is usually a better pick in terms of readability since that’s the standard for actual books since ereaders tend to display it better than pdfs. Most people reading books via files would be using something that can give a better experience with epub vs pdf.

    • warmaster@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Depends on the type of book. Since you need HTML for all non default styles. Therefore, it raises the bar… you need a bit of web dev knowledge which removes the biggest benefit of markdown: simplicity / ease of use.

    • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlOPM
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      8 months ago

      Markdown is awesome, I agree! I did not realize you could extend markdown with anything other than html. The html extension is quite nice to do anything that markdown doesn’t support natively, but I wish there was an easier way to extend markdown. Maybe the ones you listed are what I need.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Hedgedoc / hackmd support a good amount of extensions out of the box. I think typora and obsidias do also (but not open source).