I do agree with @MotownDoc and @TimM, I am really struggling to see the point of Markdown.
I really want to like it and want to use it but I just cannot see how it would fit into any of my workflows… Is it just because I do not write blogs or stuff for the web?
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How long do you save files? Remember Stephen and David talking about how difficult it would be to open old MacWrite files? My old Word 5.1 files (the last rock solid version of Word I ever used, coded specifically for 68000 processors and before Microsoft decided to ribbonize like mad and make Mac development come late and ape Windows apps) are impossible to read right if they had complicated formatting, for example.
The several reasons for Markdown were laid out pretty clearly in the podcast one by one. A single reason might not be sufficient for some, but together it explains why everything from discussion forums to XCode documentation uses the format.
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I think there was a mistake in the Discord/Discourse Discourse is the forum Software like is used here but Discord is the chat based app.
Yes, but both use Markdown!
As I have noted above, I write in Markdown all the time and love the advantages it has. However, the one disadvantage to me and the main reason that I cannot write in Markdown full time is its lack of collaboration tools. As an academic, I rarely author papers alone. This means I need to track document changes across time. Thus, I need features like track changes. So, I typically write the first draft of a manuscript in Markdown (in Ulysses) because I prefer the focus on content and distraction free writing environment and then have to export to Word for my co-authors.
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Yes, we discussed this recently here. There are some apps which own specific features, and for those who need to track changes, nothing on the Mac matches Word.
could you not track changes for Markdown using Git?
Edit: here’s examples of what I mean for people that don’t know:
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Thanks for pointing me to that thread. I had not seen it.
I could and it would work great but, I would need to convince every collaborator that I have (which is many) to use Git. The amount of resistance I would face would not be worth it. Thanks for the suggestion though. Almost every academic I work with has and uses MS Word for their writing making me the outliner.
This forum also supports markdown.
I appreciate that it depends on your perspective and level of experience, but I would contend that having to write or adapt CSS adds too much friction to the process for most people.
My experience with the vast majority of templates is that they are geared for online output and to get something to print sensibly without using half a forest I need to…
- Reduce the page borders
- Make the font sizes for each style smaller
- Reduce the line and paragraph spacing
As soon as you start doing this in CSS you run in to issues like
- Which HTML elements to style (remembering that using Markdown is supposed to avoid the need to have to care about HTML in the first place) ?
- Which property to adjust (Margin, Border, Padding etc) ?
- Which units to use (pt, em, cm etc) ?
- What the syntax is for the thing you want to change ?
- Which styles apply to which output media ?
- The variation in CSS support between browsers (e.g. Safari, which is the default rendering engine on iOS/iPadOS does not support the CSS at page rule)
- I’ll stop there !
CSS is a great tool, but it is primarily aimed at web programmers, not end users who just want to make a few relatively simple tweaks to their output formatting.
So don’t get me wrong, I really love the Markdown concept of focussing on content first and I think there are some brilliantly innovative Markdown editors out there.
I just think there is an opportunity to optimise the back end of the workflow to make it easier to get from that content to a perfectly formatted end product, especially when it comes to printed output.
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I really enjoyed this episode. I had to extend my walk just to hear the end of it. I was surprised that there was no mention of my favourite Markdown editor Typora. It is currently (and has been for years) free and in beta but for my money, is the best of both worlds. Type using markdown and, in the same window see the formatted text. I have a YouTube channel I use Typora for creating all of my scripts. Also, since my channel is on developing software using Swift, I love the fact that I can add not only code blocks, but code fences using ``` to surround the code. It is multi-featured and definitely worth the look. I even did a YouTube video on this app I love it so much. Markdown with Typora
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Except we’re not talking about ‘most people’ - we’re talking about an individual on a ‘power users’ forum who has a specific desire to customize printed Markdown output using Marked 2 (an infinitesimally small group, I think you’d acknowledge) but won’t or can’t make a one-time change to customize CSS as a style. Customizing printed output of any kind in an app is usually complicated or difficult, depending on what you want to do; I don’t see other apps being substantially better at it, and I see other formats having numerous disadvantages already detailed.
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Typora is a very powerful app and its WYSIWYG presentation has been years ahead of the competition (which is only now starting to catch up, or promise to). But otherwise it’s a pretty basic Markdown app.
I would add to this one thing: basic CSS isn’t that hard to learn. A day or two and you’ll get the hang of it.
Maybe not a consensus, but another similar view form a good source: From Kieran Healy, “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.”
“In these circumstances you might also collaborate using Google Docs or some other service that allows for simultaneously editing the master copy of a document. This may not be ideal, but it is better than not collaborating. There is little to be gained from plain-text dogmatism in a .docx world.”
^^I’m trying to keep this in mind while transitioning my academic workflow to plain text.
Some other useful resources for writing with md in research contexts:
Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff have an excellent set of principals and a how-to for md that walks through Pandoc 101. “Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown”
I also found Scott Selisker’s “A Plain Text Workflow for Academic Writing with Atom” to be super helpful. He walks through his psudo-Scrivener setup with Atom.
Working on longer writing projects, and moving between Atom and Obsidian, feels conceptually seamless, or close to it.
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Thanks! These resources look interesting. I will check them out.
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I came here to post exactly that same tip. 
I find this to be a handy and natural way to think of Markdown links (and I suppose it was consciously designed that way)
[Button](https://www.LinkToWebsiteFromButton.com)
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I develop and customize content management systems and we’ve found that markdown fields usually work better than WYSIWYG fields because markdown sets the right expectation for the user that the template is going to handle the presentation. Providing something that feels like Word, even with limited buttons, results in users trying to do too much with it.
I’m not a writer, with most of what I do write going on a presentation or the notes and the rich text in Keynote is the way to go there. Markdown is not for me really.
But, the fact that web services and text editors can provide simple formatting that I can use without effort is brilliant. I also use the syntax in emails sometimes because underscores either side of a word provide stress elegantly; they slow the reader just the right amount.
So, I love Markdown even though I use it rarely.
I loved this episode. I’ve been using Markdown since I bought David’s (and Eddie Smith’s) original Field Guide.
Drafts and 1Writer are my current two Markdown apps of choice. I use 1Writer for long-form fiction writing and I use Drafts for everything else (Emails, Texts, Notes, etc.). Drafts works on iOS and macOS and the sync is super-fast and reliable. 1Writer (iOS) saves individual plain text files to iCloud so that many Mac apps can access/edit them from there. If pushed, I could make do with Drafts alone, especially since the addition of the simple but powerful hyperlinking between drafts (using a Markdown-like syntax based on [[Double Square Brackets]].
On a future note, I hope we’re not too far away from seeing the fruits of the labour from Brett Terpstra and Fletcher Penney, who have been working on a replacement for Multi-Markdown Composer and nvAlt. I can’t think of two greater experts in this field, but the project is a long time coming. See this Blog Post from last year.
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