Re: Markdown writers: plain text or WYSIWYG editor?

[Joe Pairman <joepairman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

At least half of lightweight markupâs appeal to writers is the unambiguous
storage of simple semantics.

With Word, a list is not a list and a heading is not a heading. There are
so many things you can do to mess those styles up.

Asciidoc, RST, and to some extent Markdown provide a clear way to specify
that a list is just a list; a heading just an h1, h2, or h3. But that
doesnât mean everyone wants to type out all those asterisks, dashes, and
hash symbols. Look at the popularity of all the Markdown tools that provide
keyboard shortcuts and semi-formatted views!

For my money, Dropbox Paper gets very close to perfection in terms of a
mass-market editor with unambiguous, unbreakable simple semantics and
really great UX. (It used to be a Medium copy but has now surpassed
Medium.) Not that Iâm recommending it as a tech docs tool, just an example
of a fantastic writing environment.

Joe

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 02:50 Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net> wrote:

> I'm curious about writers who are working in Markdown or similar
> lightweight markup (asciidoc, restructuredtext etc etc).
>
> Do you work mostly in the raw text? Or do you use some kind of
> WYSYWIG-style graphical editor and stay away from the raw plain text
> syntax?
>
> Personally I would probably stick with the plain text.
>
> Mark Giffin
> Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
> http://markgiffin.com/
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