[chipotle_coyote]

> A Song of Ice and Fire was not written with Word.

When startups haven't even started up yet but are worrying about how they can scale to billion-dollar unicorn level, a common refrain on Hacker News has been "you are not Google."

Allow me to give you the fiction writers' equivalent: you are not George R.R. Martin.

[nix23]

The output is md....dont you think you can convert that too let's say docx? You don't even have to be Google todo that.

And if you want to let it proof read by George R.R. Martin you can even convert it to WordStar....magic eh? Pandoc can do that...your MS Word too?

[chipotle_coyote]

You're missing the point that people are trying to make here.

Yes, it's possible to convert Markdown to a Word file, with a variety of tools. You can use Pandoc to do this if you are the sort of person who is comfortable using tools like Pandoc. I can do that, along with all sorts of other things, because I am that sort of nerd.

However, most fiction writers and editors are not that sort of nerd. Most people don't want to use Markdown in the first place. Of the people who do want to use Markdown, not all of them are that sort of nerd, either. They want an "Export to > DOCX" command in their editor, not "save the Markdown file, open your terminal app, change to your documents directory, and type "pandoc -o my-novel.docx my-novel.md". (And that's assuming they're not doing something like, well, what NovelWriter does, saving individual chapters and perhaps even individual scenes as independent files.)

Look, I love Pandoc. It's great. But it's not a tool for everyone. If someone is trying to embrace the plain text lifestyle with a tool like NovelWriter but pointing out not being able to export to a Word file is a problem for them, asking "are you comfortable with Unix command line tools" and then telling them about Pandoc if they say yes might be a great idea -- but starting out with "obviously you hate the Unix way", maybe not so much.

> you can even convert it to WordStar....magic eh? Pandoc can do that.

No, in fact it cannot. :)

[spijdar]

> (And that's assuming they're not doing something like, well, what NovelWriter does, saving individual chapters and perhaps even individual scenes as independent files.)

This is totally unrelated to the gist of this thread, but I just wanted to point out that novelWriter's project builder outputs to a single file, which can be markdown, ODF, PDF, HTML, and others. Pandoc could then make a single DOCX file out of that.

Your point still stands that this is too complicated for the average user, but I just wanted to mention this since it might make a difference for technically minded writers considering novelWriter.

[chipotle_coyote]

That makes sense (I figured novelWriter did that, since it looks an awful lot like an attempt at a Markdown-based answer to Scrivener and that's how Scrivener's "Compile" function works), and I suspect it won't be too difficult for novelWriter to add other file formats to its exporter. So not being able to output DOCX is probably not a long-term issue, unless the maintainers have a philosophical objection to it. :)

[nix23]

First, your probably right and i may/really have missed the point.

Second...it really cant.

Shame on me, and sorry for my tone.

[rusticpenn]

How are you going to handle editor comments without losing history?