[houshuang]

This looks great - hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement Markdown as well. I really want to be writing my academic papers in Markdown or some other simple markup (my papers usually have a surprisingly simple structure), and still have them look nice. Making it _much_ easier to create nice-looking templates would be great (maybe even a GUI editor for templates).

However, I would also love to see more movement towards more flexible, semantic document formats for for example academic papers... I want to be able to read papers in my preferred style, whether on my iPad, Kindle or Mac. But still good support for citations, highlighting etc. Maybe epub is the way to go, not sure.

Anyway very exciting project, and good luck!

[jmct]

Pandoc does almost exactly what you want. Much of my academic writing is written in markdown and then pandoc converts that to LaTeX. For conference papers it doesn't work as well (due to the conferences having specific style requirements) but for notes and presentations it works wonderfully.

[hebz0rl]

You can always define a template via `--template=MyTemplate`. You just have to place the template in `.pandoc/templates/MyTemplate.[latex|html|...]`.

[yannis]

Markdown is very limited and you will soon hit a wall, when you get down to writing a thesis rather than a paper. For example if you want to write something to the Table of Contents which is not the section title itself.

       \section[short]{Long Title}

It is also possible within pdfLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to write shorter commands.

A GUI will eventually slow you down and is impossible to cater for the hundreds of commands including commonly used packages.

[Frozenlock]

You could look at Org Mode. You can write your document in a similar fashion you would with Markdown, but then you can export in many other formats (including exporting to LaTeX and PdfTeX).

[srik]

Isn't Org Mode tied to one editor.

[melling]

Don't think so. It's simply a file format like markdown. Github will render org files. Think they use this Ruby gem.

https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby

Perhaps we need more complete implementations but there's nothing preventing anyone from finishing the job.

[fusiongyro]

I think Markdown and semantic markup are nearly incompatible, unless you want some kind of highly hacked version of Markdown. You might look into Textile though, which looks similar to Markdown but has built-in support for annotating with HTML classes and IDs and whatnot.

[rhythmvs]

A Call for Scholarly Markdown — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615717