I never really liked the WordPress editor. I usually edited my text in Google docs and then copied it to WordPress. I added formations and links in the WordPress.

Now I have switched to Jekyll and I write all my posts in Markdown. Best thing about this is that I can use Vim to edit my posts.

MS Word also has one of the worst systems for making a ToC I’ve ever seen. I think that’s part of the reason so many Kindle books, even the well edited ones, have a poor or nonexistent ToC. Now as to why they lack any formatting to separate chapters with the page break being easily handled is quite beyond the range of what I’m willing to guess at.

I’m definitely a fan of the plain text markup languages also. They can be extended to long-form publishing. For a book I’m currently working on, I’ve set up to generate LaTeX from reStructuredText source, with Erik Hetzner’s extensions mixed in to produce citations from Zotero. It’s taken a lot of work to set up, but having direct, well-defined control over the text has freed me to play some tricks in the typesetting (I hope successfully) that would not have been practicable otherwise; and with the original text in reStructuredText, it won’t be a huge burden, once the print version is out, to produce ebooks from the same source.

much has happened in the last 9 months,
— if you live in the mac world anyway —
so let me catch all of you up on the latest.

check out “multimarkdown composer”…
multimarkdown is a version of markdown
that address all the original shortcomings.
and “composer” is a dedicated editor that
shows you a formatted preview window,
for the two-pane format described above.
in the mac app store, for less than $10…

if you like the idea of a formatted preview,
but prefer to use your favorite editing app,
you must grab “marked” from the app store.
it’s the “second pane” for _any_ text-editor.
unfortunately, the latest version is lion only.
but in the mac app store, and less than $5…

there are lots of other markdown editors
around today, and always more coming,
but those two will take care of you nicely.

but let’s get back to the top of the article…

i’ve invented a form of light markup that is
even lighter than markdown. i call my baby
“zen markup language” — z.m.l. for short —
and i’ll be releasing apps for it very shortly.
my apps are cross-plat (mac, p.c., and linux),
and i will also have a version up on the web…
(it’ll go live at “zen magic love dot com” soon.)

my workflow is aimed squarely at doing books,
and the needs of books (rather than websites),
so the output formats are .html (for the web),
as well as .pdf and .epub and .mobi (kindle)…

-bowerbird

I’ve been playing with reST (reStructuredText) recently. It’s more featureful than Markdown, but still very similar (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html).

Retext is a basic two-panes editor for *nix (very much like Mou), which supports both Markdown and reST (http://sourceforge.net/p/retext/home/ReText/).

@ Chris Wellons:

Agreed. As nice as markdown is, it is very, very limited. Now, I like to pretend that this is by design. It’s “markup light” and if you need something heavier you use HTML or big-boy tools like LaTex.

But yeah – we are seeing mass exodus from the word platform as evidenced by proliferation of “creative writing editors” such as writeroom. Also, Macs now have pretty good versioning built into the OS. I mentioned it in my review of CleanWriter Pro editor some time ago.

I think Scrivner is pushing creative writing clients software in a new direction. They are trying to make a tool specifically for creatives, not business users with their memos and fax coversheets. So Scrivner has snapshots (for versioning and tagging), multi-document merging, high level manipulation features (abstracts chapters/sections as sticky notes on cork board), syntax formatting for screenplays and stage plays and etc. I believe Neil Stephenson (a long time Emacs user) was quoted praising.

Granted, I never used it, and I’m not sure how good the export features are. Neal Stephenson might have written a book in it, but he is a high profile author with a real publisher that can sit there all day and massage his prose into the right format in Word if need be. So I’m not sure if this is the solution.

So there is definitely movement away from word and that is good.

I like the idea of simplicity of markdown married to the power of LaTex but is that even possible? The more features you add to a markdown language, the more complex it becomes.

@ Matt`:

Markdown to html is a single pass compile and it is usually really fast. It can be done at a satisfactory pace even in Javascript and it works pretty well – see this online two pane editor.

But yeah, ideally I would want to use my editor of choice and some stand alone viewer. Right now when I write markdown I set up vim to run it through Markdown.pl script, and open the file in a web browser for me as a preview. It works fine for me, but it’s definitely not user friendly.

In essence we need a handful of two pane editors

Not so sure on this one – 2 pane is fine, but it can be clunky sometimes. Especially if there’s a compile/typeset step between changes in the code pane and visible changes in the pretty pane.

Would be nice to have a system that pretended, some of the time, to be WYSIWYG, inserting sensibly formatted syntax marks for you at the push of a friendly GUI button and showing you the results in realtime, but made it as easy as possible to jump back and forward between the two so you can hack on the code directly, maybe showed a few non-printing marks in the ‘preview’ mode to avoid the problem of accidentally clicking inside of hidden syntax tags, and had the option to break it out into 2 panes if you so desired.

Seems like all the editors have their little grumbles, and that we’re still waiting for the magical one that answers all problems, but I guess some of those grumbles are born of mutually contradictory demands. That said, there’s plenty of editors I have no experience or even knowledge of, there may already be one that includes all the features I want and made all the same design choices as I would. If not, I’ll just have to write one some day. Maybe.

I’m still not really satisfied with any of the existing solutions. You’re right that using Word documents is a horrible way to go about it. It proves that the publishing industry is still highly computer illiterate. It means there’s no knowledge of source control and clean source transformations (i.e. tidy change diffs).

I’ve wanted to write nice documents in clean markup for work and for my own projects. Even if I ignore the fact that most of my co-workers really only know WYSIWYG and know very little about source control, so I’d often be trapped anyway, every system as something that I don’t like. They’re all 80% solutions.

You talk about some of the problems with LaTeX, which I agree with. The markup is heavy and ugly. The system is huge. In my experience, if I need to do anything non-standard, it takes a huge amount of tweaking and boilerplate.

I’ve also looked into groff. With the mom package, it’s really quite usable and produces great results. Unfortunately, it’s markup is the worst of all. Not all of it can be done in-line, and the in-line markup it has is huge and whitespace sensitive. And, to a greater degree, doing anything non-standard takes lots and lots of tweaking and hacking.

I use Markdown a lot for my blog these days, as you know. It’s my favorite kind of markup. It’s clean and looks really good in plain text, as you pointed out. As long as I’m not getting fancy, I love writing in it. However, the spec is unfortunately incomplete. Each Markdown engine has it’s own extensions to help deal with it, but you can’t count on the extensions being there. It’s too inflexible, making some sorts of things impossible.

For example, sometimes I’d really like to use markup inside a code block. There’s no way to do this in Markdown. I’ve also wanted to use a heading inside a list item. Also not possible.

For my blog, I often end up dropping back to HTML a lot, to do things Markdown can’t do. The Markdown engine I’m using, Maruku, isn’t extensible, so I can’t make interesting modifications to its output, like automatically adding an attribute to certain HTML tags it outputs.

So I end up falling back to HTML — something that’s a bit too low level. The markup is a little heavy, though generally not too unbearable. CSS adds tons of flexibility, though it’s quite complicated, and some parts of it aren’t fully supported everywhere. It’s imprecise, which, to circle back around, is one of the limitations of Word: the exact look of your document depends on your fonts, screen resolution, etc.

My ideal system would look a lot like Markdown, but with a well-designed, fully extensible engine — kind of like LaTeX.

Especially concerning E-Books, it is important to have a format, that the reader can adapt to what it needs. When I am writing I use plaintext and a ‘markdown’ that I change later when it goes into formatting normally I use //italic text// and **bold text**. Chapters I mark with ###

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Diaspora has markdown? That’s pretty cool. One of these days I will need to check it out. One can never be in enough social networks, eh?

@ Peter:

I didn’t love MarkdownPad. Mou seems more polished. Personally, I would be perfectly happy with a read-only Markdown “viewer” that you could open the files with. I write in vim anyway so no need for another editor.

Pandoc and MultiMarkdown both do Markdown to ODF conversion. ODF files can be open in MS Office starting with 2010 so that works. And if you really need a .doc file you can always take a single extra step and use Open Office to convert it for you.

In fact, I wish Open Office had a command line switch that basically said “fuck off, stay in the background and just convert this input file to .doc for me” for that very purpose.