[igravious]

Anecdotally lots of people are using Markdown and Pandoc to get from lightweight files to decent PDF or HTML.

Ok, you're not going to use it if you need actual typesetting, for that just use TeX and be done with it. What we're seeing I think is the same type of backlash that spawned YAML from XML.

Funny thing is, the actual space for .docx or .odt could be shrinking, is it?

[pling]

Docx and Odt will live forever. 99% of the population will continue to use them. Hell I write hundreds of pages of documentation every year in Word 2010 and use LibreOffice at home because its easy. I use LaTeX for anything that is 'published'.

I hope we don't get another YML, an inferior and minute subset of XML's capabilities with all its problems and none of its advantages and tooling. I've used XML for years and once you understand it properly it's fine.

Call me old school but I find lightweight markup to be a hack job.

[nmrm]

> Call me old school but I find lightweight markup to be a hack job.

The best way to think of it is that markdown is a replacement for .txt. It's not a typesetting language, it's just a conventional way to structure text documents.

Most of the elements of markdown are already there in .txt files from the 80s and 90s. All markup does is standardize how to do headers, lists, code blocks and bold/italic so that you can generate documents that actually contain those elements, but could also just treat a markdown file as a normal .txt.

[drifkin]

I really like starting documents where I write most text with Markdown, but write out any equations with LaTeX syntax. Pandoc works great for this.

Invariably, if I work on the document for any lengthy period of time, I end up giving up on using Markdown. I'll generate LaTeX output using Pandoc and just start editing it manually.