That outlining / numbering thing was (IIRC) a big feature of WordPerfect which (IIRC) kept it alive for a number of years after it was clear that Word was eventually going to snuff them out.
I used to love WordPerfect. Now I’m trying to remember when I used it last. Probably around 2000?
I wonder if the compliers for Markdown will get more efficient. LaTeX lets you define what is a Section and a subsection. The compiler handles the numbering and levels. Of course the price is the complexity of LaTeX.
All I can say is thank goodness - in ASCII - letters are contiguous. (Unlike in EBCDIC.) 
And “what have the Romans ever done for us?” Given us a complex numbering system. Here in MMXX we shouldn’t have to still be using it.
+1. Besides Word 5.1a (the peak of the word processor), I have files in AppleWorks and ClarisWorks (later college papers), and even some PageMaker files (my old resume, some newsletters). Call me old, call me a data hoarder, but I still have them. I don’t think I’ll ever see their contents again, at least, not without considerable effort that will far exceed the value of the words.
But what I write today, in Markdown, I’ll be able to read forever. With a wide variety of viewing tools and features. (Fortunately I’m a much better writer these days. 
I’m a technical writer for a large software company (Salesforce, if it matters; my words here are my own). We currently author our documentation in an XML format called DITA. (If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone; I had never heard of it when I interviewed for the job.)
We’re evaluating a switch to use Markdown for our documentation, with goals along the same lines as e.g. Microsoft, with their public-facing docs available on GitHub. (For example, see: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs)
The top challenge I want to see solved is the collaboration part. Frederico’s and the MacStories authoring workflow, while impressive, has a number of issues. From experience, relying on diffs and comments on a Pull Request (PR) are nowhere near sufficient to support a rigorous editorial process for use across a large team.
It’s not impossible to do great work—MacStories proves it is possible. But it’s a small team, and while MacStories is a great site, it’s a series of chronologically ordered, occasionally linked, mostly stand-alone articles, not a structured documentation site. And MacStories gets to put a little more … personality into their prose than, say, a public corporation can put into their docs. (I have stories…)
For a large team of technical writers, collaboration requires a couple things:
It seems to me that CriticMarkup provides enough of these elements to (mostly?) solve these use cases. But, the markup format is only half the story. Less than half, by the evidence. It needs to be supported in tools, similarly to how change tracking and comments are handled in e.g. GDocs.
From what I can tell, only MultiMarkdown Composer supports CriticMarkup sufficiently to be usable as a professional tool by people where the writing is the important thing, rather than proficiency with an esoteric extension to Markdown.
Does anyone know if any of the other various Markdown authoring or previewing tools has plans to support CriticMarkup, at a similar level as MultiMarkdown Composer?
Note: There’s obviously more to collaboration than these two things, and CriticMarkup doesn’t solve it all. I’m setting aside other aspects, because we’ve been using version control for our docs for ~20 years, and that handles most of the rest. That’s probably not sufficient for every team. (Good luck getting clients, let alone opposing counsel, to work with you on GitHub today, right @MacSparky?)
But CriticMarkup solves a lot of the challenges I’ve seen in our tests with GitHub-based writing workflows. We need it, or something like it, for a switch to Markdown to succeed.
From other posts here, it seems like these specific challenges are not unique to Salesforce, or technical writing. I think CriticMarkup, or something like it, represents a significant step forward for using Markdown in more structured, less solitary writing processes and contexts.
@ismh Stephen, in the episode you mentioned that you use Markdown on your WordPress site. Have you written about the details of how that works? It seems like there’s two primary plug-ins that support Markdown on WordPress, neither of which are the one I used to use, and both of which seem to have…trade-offs. I’d be really interested in knowing how you’re making it work, especially if you have code syntax highlighting on the site, too.
My md2pptx Open Source Markdown to PowerPoint project supports CriticMarkup.
While I doubt Salesforce would adopt md2pptx (and its companion mdpre) it is an example of CriticMarkup being used elsewhere. (As an IBMer I can’t get IBM to adopt these tools, so no chance of getting Salesforce to.)
If you care to resurrect them Word and Claris Works files can be rad into Libre Office by doing an Open file not a double click. It comes in as plain text untitled and at least some of the formatting is gone but you can recover the words if it is important.
Since I routinely read, refer to and need to access files that originally started out in many different old systems one of my major tasks regularly is to do the conversion of all the old files to the latest formats. I am doing that now as part of a year end archive and amajor disk and data clean-up.
I do the same, each year. I convert the variety of file formats I’ve received throughout the year, so that all my important files will be future proof. I convert to Markdown or PDF (if there is complex formatting).
I have an Omnifocus task each year that reminds me and I got the notification this morning. I’m in the process of converting - what a coincidence that you posted this today!
I use Jetpack, which handles the Markdown and a lot more.
I’ll start with the disclaimer that I have a “barely scratched the surface” knowledge of markdown. I understand that using markdown has advantages for publishing to the web, archiving, and sharing data with other applications. I understand that some see the “plainness” and “simplicity“ of the text to be a benefit to focusing on content when writing.
However, I’m surprised that in a Mac/iOS community no one seems to be talking about the aesthetic (or lack of aesthetic) quality of the markdown environment. It was the beauty of the WYSIWYG of McWrite that induced me to purchase my first Mac in 1984. After writing in DOS for several years (with formatting codes looking a lot like markdown), it was a joy to write in an aesthetically beautiful environment like MacWrite. I have continued to use macs and iOS devices not only because they are technically functional, but because their operating systems and apps are beautiful environments to work in.
From my viewpoint, working in markdown seems like a big step backwards, a big step back into the pre-Mac “who cares what it looks like as long as it’s functional” super tech geek mentality. When I look at markdown application windows, they immediately remind me of everything I hated about writing in DOS programs.
Am I missing something here? Does no one else appreciate working in a beautiful environment?
I think there certainly are those who like it for the straight up utility, not to mention ease of use with something like version control systems.
However, I believe that the reason that Bear and Ulysses (among others) are popular is due (at least in part) to the fact that they will show some ‘rendered markdown’ when you are writing.
When I am working on something and really care how it looks, I will open it in Marked and have the editing window on one side, and Marked on the other.
I think the utility of markdown is the separation of presentation and content. I can designate the function of a text (not as easily as LaTex) without getting lost in choices of fonts, sizes and justifications.
A beautiful page is beguiling because it provides an unconscious sense of completeness in a way that plain text does not. Admittedly, I do enjoy working on my Mac more than my Windows machine because of the time taken to make a more functional and beautiful operating system. It is certainly a more enjoyable experience.
However, I like working in Markdown because of the simplicity of the environment. Once I get my message out I can admire the beauty of my work with Marked. If I knew anything about CSS I could even make more stylistic choices after structuring the content.
I too like to work in “beautiful” environments. And I’ve found that Markdown is the best way to get that.
There is a wonderful aesthetic to plain text and monospace fonts. (My favorite is ISO, which I’m using everywhere I can.)
In addition to separating content from format (or, put differently, forcing semantic structure on your documents), plain text is so much more portable than any rich text format—I don’t have to worry about an app update or a round trip to another app or platform breaking all my careful formatting and styling.
One of my least favorite things to do is fixing bad formatting from others’ files. If I could get my industry to adopt plain text with semantic markup like markdown, I would do it in a heartbeat.
I’m going to quote from the user guide of my own md2pptx Markdown to PowerPoint converter, because I think it encapsulates something:
The author developed a presentation over 10 years in Powerpoint and OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It became very inconsistent in formatting - fonts, colours, indentations, bullets, etc… It was a horrible mess.
He took the trouble to convert it to Markdown and regenerated it with a very early version of md2pptx. The presentation looks nice again, with consistent formatting.
It was relatively little trouble to convert to Markdown. In fact it took about an hour to convert the 40 slide presentation. The consistency gain was automatic.
The point is it’s very easy to end up with a mess of visual effects, and to lose sight of the structure of the data. I prefer not to do that.
I’m also not a designer so I use - at least with md2pptx - the smart master my team uses. So there’s a real “separation of concerns” argument.
I also like the “any text editor you like” aspect of Markdown - and use several. Plus several renderers every day (including Marked, Drafts, mdpre and md2pptx). mdpre is a preprocessor - so the text-based format has an advantage here as well.
@Jeagar52 I’ll not repeat the reasons already given above for the value of markdown as I agree with all of them. I use markdown extensively.
However, I’m find that the Craft app gives me both markdown and aesthetics. I’m finding myself using it constantly.
Take a look at this article—you may find it helpful. There is also this post on Craft.
I’m moving more to markdown for important things for data persistence and portability.
Aesthetics are relatively unimportant to me. I like the cleanliness and functionality of the Mac operating system but since I usually use either plain taxt or rich text documents and I like simple fonts the formatting in Markdown is not really a hindrance and it does provide more consistent portability than other formats.
Perhaps. But then that would also explain the infatuation with the super irritating dark mode for apps with wild colors and little contrast that are impossible to see especially in small font sizes. (I’m looking at you Obsidian default dark theme).
What I see with markdown is that you can easily separate the structure and content from the look and feel and that makes it clean, simple and user friendly. What it does seem to take is finding a set of both editors and preview apps that work for you. I’m still explorng both the editing/creation side of markdown and the display/presentation side by testing out a bunch of apps but haven’t settled on the set that works for me yet. I am also trying to train my fingers to use markdown syntax instead of my decades old ingrained in set of my own hints that I then can search for and use to format stuff later. As I develop those habits in muscle memory I am sure that creating text in markdown will get a lot faster and easier.
If simplicity is what draws you to Markdown, let me remind some of you of the Byword editor. It may be old but it is still beautiful in its simplicity and is available in the Mac App Store and on iOS. I find it to be enough for my journal writing and doing minor formatting to text I have clipped from the web. It integrates nicely with the ever-growing collection of files I keep in the EagleFiler app.
Thanks for the links to the articles. I’ll check out Craft.
Thanks for your comments and perspectives in using Markdown. I’ve been experimenting with Ulysses and Drafts. Question: When I go into the editor settings on Ulysses, I’m given the option to go with the default font "System Font " "Sans Serif) and then a list of choices such as Optima, System Font, Verdana, etc. Under the “Font Book” section are choices for Monospaced, Sans Serif, Serif, etc.
Does it matter what font I use to get the benefits of Markdown? Can I, for instance, use a Serif font like say Georgia when I compose and the Markdown results are still the same? Are the fonts more like window dressing in this context then in RTF? Does it make any difference what font I choose to work in?
I’ve looked at a lot of sources and can’t find an answer. I’d appreciate your help.