Markdown is just really bad for books. Need need something like Asciidoc, that maximizes the ePUB formatting capabilities.
Discussion
You think Markdown is fantastic because most markdown editors als include HTML and other junk into the converter. You can't see how much they have to "fix" and "add", on their part. That's why it ports so badly from one website to another.
Can't even resize an image with Markdown.
That was my experience.
Injected some simple HTML for formatting and that was then butchered in different ways by different clients.
I love markdown for notes, wikis, etc. but for anything that needs to look pretty it falls short imo.
We're not going to kill Medium with Markdown.
yeah, i'm 100% in support of asciidoc as the preferred format, it's a complete and sane syntax... i'd describe it as being like the PostScript of graphical text rendering, and of course it can flatten down to paper as well, i think it does it even better than html as used in epub
i can't see myself printing stuff very much, and if any, it would have to be laser or dye sub for durability, but this is a nice feature
Yes, it's designed specifically to generate e-books (hence the sectioning and doc metadata structure with author, version, etc.), but allows you to have the middle step of rendering as HTML. Very elegant solution, IMO.
I hate Markdown for wikis. I tend to write academic wiki articles and THE TABLE FORMATTING FROM HELL HAUNTS MY DREAMS. 😱😅
Lots of wiki pages contain tables that are actually images, and I totally get it.
Of course, then you can't resize those images, or determine the horizontal placement, so it's just moving from one problem to the next.
Oh, I know. Support by clients is still abysmal though. Doesn't even support stuff that's part of the very original spec.
I occasionally write long-form articles, but I've been republishing them in my blog on #Alexandria.
I'm eventually only going to write them directly there, but it doesn't have kind 1111 comments and highlights, yet, and some styling is still being added, so that's what I'm waiting for.
I understand that. Most people don't write books though, they write articles.
Even for articles I found it wanting - or at least I found consistent client implementation wanting.
I want to port all my stuff to nostr, I really do. But with the current state of things I can't. That's how bad it is lol
Yeah, but we've opened up the possibility of doing it like I do, where you create a magazine event and steadily add articles to it, as you write them. Once you have a large enough collection of articles, you could print it as a book.
Then they appear, as you write them, as articles, and also appear in your compendium of articles.