[timtylin]

Note: I'm the maintainer of this project

The series of blog posts by Martin (and his efforts with John in getting citations to work in Pandoc) was the impetus of this project. I've reached out to Martin several months ago for comments, but I've not heard from him since. I guess he's very busy with his day job at PLOS. If he's willing, I'd very much like to reconcile this project with his efforts. The goal is, after all, better authoring workflows for all academics compared to the status quo, and it's going to take some concerted effort to get us all out of this giant energy well we got going for a few decades now.

[mfenner]

Scholarly Markdown is very much a group of like-minded people, and we had a workshop with lots of good discussions in June 2013 (http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/06/17/what-is-scholarly-ma...). What it has not been until the recent effort by timtylin is a specific set of tools, or spec.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on how to do this right, and that is part of the reason why the whole concept is pretty fragmented. Some of my thoughts:

Pandoc is the markdown converter that comes closest to what most people need, so I am happy to stick with it. I personally don't think that a fork is viable, things are already hard enough as it is.

Scholarly markdown is a solution for 80% of use cases, people writing math-heavy texts are probably better of sticking with Latex.

Scholarly markdown needs to be a community effort, I don't see any other way on how this can succeed

[timtylin]

Hi Martin! Thanks for dropping by.

> I personally don't think that a fork is viable, things are already hard enough as it is.

I don't think so either. Scholdoc as a fork was always intended to be a stop-gap measure to quickly test out ideas. Pandoc's use of relatively standard Parsec is easier to hack, and lots of other subsystems like citeproc remain crucial. Scholdoc changes Pandoc's AST, so any discussion of re-integration is going to be a non-starter until at least 2.0

For this kind of workflow to be viable, 95% of the required effort is not going to be on the syntax/converter anyways. The real hard work is still ahead.

> Scholarly markdown is a solution for 80% of use cases, people writing math-heavy texts are probably better of sticking with Latex.

I agree, except I also think that there can be a 80% situation for math. I work with a lot of applied mathematicians/electrical engineers, and the math system in Scholdoc is designed with them in mind.

I really think that the ultimate goal is to arrive at many good ways (of which this may be one) to produce semantically-relavant open interchange format such as JATS. I assume this is what PLOS is trying to achieve as well? I do know that several people at PLOS is vehemently opposed to Markdown and what it stands for.

> Scholarly markdown needs to be a community effort, I don't see any other way on how this can succeed

Definitely. The best we can hope for is to occasionally stir this pot once in a while and hopefully something will spontaneously nucleate once the time is right.