[nikdaheratik]

Alot of interesting work, judging from the site, but this still feels like reinventing the wheel to me. In addition to AsciiDoc, there's MultiMarkdown (http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/features/ feature list is nearly identical), and probably another 3-4 that I haven't come across.

Of course, having spent the past few months writing an app that basically reinvents this same wheel (http://www.eqeditor.com/writer/) I suppose I'm in good company.

[nikdaheratik]

Another thing I'm curious about is how the ScholarlyMarkdown authors would go about trying to get papers formatted in this way to go into a database like PubMed but that's pretty far down the track, and not addressed by any of the other solutions either.

[timtylin]

The goal is eventually to be able to, like what Authorea is trying to do now, just "slap on" various LaTeX style templates during final rendering (similar to how static blog engines format plain md posts using templates). It's going to be PAINFUL but I think it is eventually doable with enough elbow grease. Markdown is a nice starting point because the features are so spartan that you actually have some hope of finding the "greatest common denominator" document model that can pretty much map injectively to all the major journal-specific LaTeX document-classes.

I'm imagining some kind of online component like ShareLaTeX that will become a clearinghouse for a number of tested and proven conversion paths, and can handle compiling a ScholarlyMarkdown document to different formats. This project won't go anywhere if this can't at least be done for major houses like Elsevier, PNAS, Phys Rev, etc.