I've spent the bulk of my career on content-driven apps, ranging from basic CMS systems to platforms that manage workflow of large, complex, legal documents. And I can tell you that while Markdown works for basic formatting of short documents, it falls short when you work with people whose entire lives revolve around long documents with complex formatting. (Attorneys, policy writers, etc.) A UX that exposes markdown to that crowd just isn't widely accepted. And that is before we even get into actual features like TOCs, headers, pagination, margin control, nested tables, etc.<p>Now, the benefits of Markdown listed in the article are all true -- but also only loosely tied to the UX of the actual document authors and editors. If Markdown supports your formatting needs, sure, it is a good storage syntax for your content, fine. But don't make attorneys, policy writers, etc., use it. I'm not saying MS Word is the only answer either, but I highly recommend that people find/modify/create a more robust editor for your authors.
Markdown is great, there are a bunch of <i>really</i> good reasons to use it.<p>But Markdown doesn't compete with Word, really at all. There's no strong reason to frame them as opposites or to suggest that one can replace the other. Word is an editor, and Markdown is a spec. Word is wysiwyg, and Markdown is not. Word is built to handle large and complex documents with complex formatting and references, Markdown is (primarily) made for lightweight use to create simple web pages.<p>Word is simultaneously an horrific beast and a beautiful program, but the list of features Word has that Markdown doesn't support is probably 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than the list of features Markdown even has. Word can do everything Markdown can do, but not the other way around, even if you allow for arbitrary HTML (which is cheating).<p>I'm all for Markdown when it's appropriate, and while I try to avoid Word for simple text documents, there are absolutely times that it's called for. Definitely learn Markdown. And then use the right tool for the job.
I've tried to switch to Markdown almost completely for portability, but I end up having to return to Word frequently to accomplish certain features. IMO, Markdown's biggest flaw was that the original feature set was incomplete, and everyone has tried to fill in the gaps (TOC, tables, references, etc.) their own way instead of settling on an updated standard. That makes it really frustrating when I've got to rely on GitHub-flavored Markdown to accomplish something without being able to trust that it will work on a platform that only supports vanilla Markdown, etc.<p>One thing I <i>will</i> give Word credit for, despite all my qualms with it, is that it's probably the only program that I can blindly paste something from my clipboard and expect that Word will render it reasonably well.
Ooooh man, I would love to do that. I enjoy writing markdown, and I enjoy using pandoc.<p>However, whenever I have to print something, there is pretty much just one possibility in Markdown: export as pdf. And export as pdf uses Latex. Latex is cool. But if you want to customize your document, you will sooner or later need to include latex headers into the "build" process of your file, and soon you have a clusterfuck of tooling and a make file for a document that was supposed to be a simple report. And then I'd rather write it in Latex.<p>Does anybody have a solution for this? Some kind of print-friendly Markdown-to-PDF workflow? All the non-Latex alternatives looked horrible. In fact, I sometimes export markdown documents to Word just to print them.
I want to use markdown for our technical documents. But MS Word really has some features that are missing that would be needed for a markdown editor to make a dent in what we need.<p>1. auto-generating table of contents<p>2. easy table creation/manipulation<p>3. header/footer and page numbering<p>4. comments/edits (maybe integrated with git?)<p>It's unrealistic to expect non-technical people to learn LaTeX, so we're stuck with MS Word until someone makes an amazing Markdown editor that can handle these things.
Last time Markdown was written about on HN, someone mentionned Typora (<a href="https://typora.io/" rel="nofollow">https://typora.io/</a>) for a very simple WYSIWYG text editing.<p>Just wanted to share it again, as it became my favorite Markdown editor for university or sometimes work.
No matter what format/tool you come up with, there will be use cases it doesn't support, yet are needed.<p>When it comes to the written word, the world of legitimate, needed use cases is HUGE. The word processor is the natural evolutionary response to this need: A complex hodge podge of features and ways to visualize the content you're creating.<p>You can tell that this article was written by an engineer because he's willing the world to fit into his neat and tidy box. It completely ignores the needs of most other industries. Were markdown to become the new standard, it wouldn't take long for a thousand ISO specs and extensions to come into being, until finally markdown is as complex as SOAP, and people go back to using Word.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Big fan of markdown and friends. At the Awesome Makrdown page [1] I try to collect all awesome goodies about Markdown. Anything missing? Contributions welcome.<p>PS: What's wrong with markdown? Let's evolve markdown (delete, yes, delete some gimmicks, change some and add some) - see Texi - Text with Instructions [2] for the "next generation" the best of markdown and wikimedia markup all together now.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/mundimark/awesome-markdown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mundimark/awesome-markdown</a>
[2]: <a href="https://texti.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://texti.github.io</a>
I was expecting a bit more from the article, given the first thing I read at the top of the page was, "(author name) just another legendary software developer."<p>As much as I dislike Word, you cannot simply compare Markdown to Word. Markdown is a text based format specification, while Word is a massive tool comprised of countless features (which happen to include a WYSIWYG editor).
Right now I'm writing a document in plain text. Not markdown but org-mode. I could export it as markdown for collaboration purposes easily enough. What I will get at the end is a higher quality document than most Word users will produce but with a minimal amount of effort.<p>The thing is a document only really contains a handful of different elements. Therefore you only need a handful of styles. What you do is make a template document for pandoc in the format of your choice (e.g. MS Word) and then your markdown/org-mode document can be automatically converted into that style.<p>The problem with Word is it makes choosing ad-hoc styles really easy instead of promoting the use of styles. It has developed a culture of people who think about text being "bold" rather than text being "a heading" or "emphasised" etc. We teach this distinctionfor HTML and CSS (and it is, to some extent, used) but for some reason still use Word for writing documents.
Couldn't agree more. I've made the switch some time ago and couldn't be happier. In fact, I wrote an entire textbook [0] and a novel [1] in Markdown (and I wrote about the markdown-to-print workflow here [2]).<p>I still use Google Docs, but more as a distributed note-taking thing, be it docs or spreadsheets, than for "production" stuff; especially for things that benefit from being version-controlled.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/ggambetta/computer-graphics-from-scratch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ggambetta/computer-graphics-from-scratch</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/the-golden-legacy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/the-golden-legacy.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/tgl_open_source.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/tgl_open_source.html</a>
Markdown is not a replacement for Word. However, you should try StackEdit (<a href="https://stackedit.io/" rel="nofollow">https://stackedit.io/</a>) if you just need a quick way to write, preview, and store Markdown files in Google Docs.
I agree that Markdown is great and all but<p>* File size. Not a big matter now-a-days but single text file can store many times more information than a binary file.<p>I don't think the author knows what a binary file is.
Ugh, so <i>close...</i><p>I've been working on translating a scanned PDF [1] back to Markdown, and I've stumbled on some issues:<p>* we're kinda targeting Github Flavored Markdown, but there's also an online version which uses Docsify, and some incompatibilities have tripped me up: hard line breaks, specifically.<p>* I've tried Mou and MacDown to edit, and the preview pane drifts out of sync, and sticks there. Both require awkward tricks to reload the files if you edit them elsewhere.<p>* diagrams and math formulae are, well, I'm kicking the can down the road on those.<p>* footnotes with text aren't exactly standard yet.<p>Glancing at Dillinger and StackEdit, mentioned in the article, I see <i>other</i> issues:<p>* multiple lines aren't automatically paragraphs<p>* StackEdit sorta supports diagrams and math expressions, but, not in a way they'll render on the target.<p>Having vented about all that, to come back to the article: this is still <i>far</i> preferable to Word. These obstacles don't feel insurmountable, and I was easily able to whip up tooling to go back and forth from one file for the book to a file per chapter, and it's mostly <i>easy</i> to track changes with git and Github.<p>[1] PAIP, previously discussed here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469167" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469167</a>
I don't understand the love for Markdown. I get that it is useful for quick and dirty formatting. But as soon as I want to make a document that can interoperate with others or has long term use requirements, I reach for XHTML. It is not sexy, but it has a well understood definition. As far as I know, Markdown still has a few different definitions that are not perfectly compatible.
I have one more: Bit-rot resistance. If you've ever tried to work on an MSWord document that's been around the houses a bit and had lots of work on it by different people (using different versions of different applications), with font choices and colours and formatting changing on a whim, you'll know they can degrade over time and become cumbersome to edit.
Most of the documents I write are letters which are printed and faxed/posted to people.I tried using asciidoc, but unlike latex there is no document class like letter, which automatically formats the content as required for a letter.I think markdown and similar methods needs to be further enhanced for many common documentation use cases.
MS Word is part of the interoffice workflow ; a formal word document has a predefined and deliberately inflexible template, it goes though several iterations of edits and approvals. Features like Track changes , templates and WYSIWYG enable organization to efficiently create reliable documents.<p>Markdown is awesome but it is not an alternative to MS Word.
I've mostly switched to Dropbox Paper for writing work-related documents (and I think that product has some, "oddness", that I'd have difficulty explaining to a non-technical person). It seems to follow markdown syntax. I find it great for general writing tasks or creating documents I want to be able to refer back to, but it's probably missing some of the publishing & formatting features people get from Google Docs & Microsoft Word.<p>I'm not a huge fan of MS Word myself, but in the limited experience I had, it's very difficult to get people to move away from it. I'm kind of feeling like this is the kind of thing that software developer see as an obvious improvement to let people know about, but miss on the fact that there isn't a huge amount of friction on the problem this solution solves.
As a current high school student: hell no.<p>I've tried writing study guides for myself in Markdown, and while it is useful, it is 10x easier to do it in Word.<p>Plus, as many people are saying, everyone uses Word. My school even gives out Office 365 subscriptions for free.
While using Markdown everywhere is probably a misguided but well-meant effort, I think it can be more easily agreed that Word is damaging as it basically limits the user to Windows (or having to import to LibreOffice which seems to be doing better but still blows up on seemingly simple office files)<p>We should be trying to remove .docx and use more widely available standards that everyone can use, even if it's just LO's format.
For legal documents, Statements of Work, bids, etc. I've been using latex a lot lately.<p>It has most of the benefits of Markdown but is way more powerful.<p>The learning curve is quite high though and to call it human readable is a stretch sometimes.<p>I like to write common documents up front then put macros in place of things like "client name" -- then at the top of the file I declare them and it makes for really easy document generation.
For people who have Word/RTF formatted text and want to convert it to markdown, this is a very nice little utility to convert text quickly: <a href="https://puppypaste.com/" rel="nofollow">https://puppypaste.com/</a><p>I use it almost every day when copy-pasting from from shared google docs.
If you are the only one editing your documents, and if you have a workflow that which needs nothing more than what Markdown provides, this is well and good. But in the business world, particularly legal and finance, this is rarely the case.
I think this is in front page because we nerds just want the definitive reason to say 'fuck Word' and use MD or similar.<p>But -as we can read in these comments- there are lots of reasons and situations where this is ridiculous.
Even better than Markdown is Org-mode: the latter can do everything the former can do, and has every advantage <i>other</i> than being massively hyper-popular, <i>and</i> it has many, many, <i>many</i> other features (definition lists, scheduling, time-tracking, task-management &c. &c. <i>ad infinitum</i>).<p>Yes, Markdown is an improvement over Word — and Org-mode is an improvement over Markdown (other than not being as popular).