But LaTeX is a very dense markup that I find pretty counterintuitive. If you can write this way, go for it, you're awesome. Some are extremely powerful, at a cost in legibility and usability. There are lots of ways to compose and format text electronically. Which Plain Text Markup to Use? (Spoiler: Some Kind of Markdown) And, as you make changes to your original, you can simply re-export to whatever formats you need, rather than trying to keep multiple copies of the same document synced up. This often takes little to no manual manipulation or scrutiny. Being willing to work with command line utilities will do wonders.įor example, with a program like Pandoc, you can easily take your documents and immediately produce readable and decent-looking PDFs, Word documents 3, web pages, eBooks, and even presentations. How much you can do, and how much flexilibility you are afforded in your workflows, will to some extent depend on how deep down the rabbit hole you're willing to go. Your syntax may go out of style, but you'll still be able to open and make sense of your documents.īecause markup conforms to relatively simple known rules, and because the internet is full of wonderful nerds, there are lots and lots and lots of tools for doing stuff with your documents. And plain text files will experience format rot at a much slower pace than rich text files. using Dropbox, for example, it's easy for me to work on the same documents on OSX, Windows, iOS, and Android. If you work in plain text, it's easy to move or sync your files between platforms. And my experience is that when a troublesome surprise crops up when composing in a plain text markup, it's something that can be diagnosed and in the future prevented. Using markup also has a different learning curve (initially steeper).īecause you're working directly with the markup that controls your document, you can see where everything is, and you know you put it here. This doesn't necessarily sound desirable, because it makes it harder to visualize as we're writing just how the end result will appear - and in fact avoiding this separation is the one of the main selling points of WYSIWYG word processors. Versa again - you're likely in for a lot of manual effort if you startīy working with marked-up plain text, we can separate the form and content of documents. Have a printed document that you need to distribute on line, or vice If you need to change the format of your document, for example if you Name a style that you need to reuse later, finding and fixingĭiscrepancies in formatting may require a great deal of tedious ![]() ![]() If you change something by accident, or if you don't It can be extremely difficult to do so consistently across a longĭocument. If you need to make any changes to your styles midstream, Of writing a sentence to perform the font setting equivalent ![]() Personally, I find it maddening to have to stop in the middle This complaint may be more of an issue for some folks than others. To synchronize formatting that it would have been faster just to When pasting text into a rich text editor, it can take so long Is liable to drastically change the appearance of your text. It's very difficult to know when hitting backspace or delete In practice, there are some pretty big problems with working this way.īecause the style boundaries aren't made visible to the user, You can see everything, tweak everything, control every aspect of your document's appearance and its content all at the same time. The software shows you the text complete with all its formatting - bold and italics, lists, tables, funky colors, borders, typography, the whole deal. Rich Text Sucksįor decades, the dominant consumer word processing paradigm has been rich text/WYSIWYG 1. ![]() I do plan to do some of that stuff in future posts, assuming I don't forget about this blog entirely, which, if you know me, is entirely plausible. Heads up: I mention a lot of different tools here, without the intention of providing anything like a detailed review or how-to guide. But I do enough Markdown evangelizing that I decided I may as well just go ahead and put the basic spiel in one place that I'll be able to reference later. I don't know whether anyone else will actually find this useful.
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