Replying to Avatar GHOST

I'm probably the only person writing a book with a text editor in markdown.

#UNTRACEABLE
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szarka 7mo ago

Nope. I wrote / am writing a textbook for the two-semester Principles of Economics sequence using markdown. Currently using it for my classes and plan to release the next draft of the micro half as an OER text at the end of the summer.

Also working on a Bitcoin book, but that's more back-burner right now. ~100 page draft.

Would love to trade tips!

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szarka 7mo ago

Why not fenced code blocks in the screenshot above?

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GHOST 7mo ago

Looked weird to me in epub conversion check. I adopted a simpler format

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szarka 7mo ago

Maybe use `inline formatting` at least?

TBH, after making sure things worked reasonably well, I put EPUB on the back burner. No demand for it from my students. (I give them HTML chunks in the LMS and a PDF to download.)

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szarka 7mo ago

Also trying to evangelize markdown to my fellow professors. Here are some slides from a presentation I gave last year at a conference on open educational resources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vKWeaW6lFWo3wDpu7jF4iAav0GMQHCMz/view?usp=drivesdk

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GHOST 7mo ago

That's awesome! Although you didn't mention the reason that I use markdown. It's future proof. I have in the past lost notes due to the format no longer being supported. Plain text will always survive and markdown is just funny looking text if it isn't supported.

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szarka 7mo ago

Yeah, another great aspect. Maybe less compelling for this use case, since ODF is a thing. But should have mentioned that in a recent presentation about using OSS toi create multimédia content. (Mostly demoing OBS, but also kdenlive, GIMP, and Audacity.)