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by mfenner
4106 days ago
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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 |
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> 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.