Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

  • southsamurai
    20•2 months ago

    Man, I’ve written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.

    There’s a learning curve, but once you get going, it’s so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It’s extra work, but worth it, imo.

    • HandlesEnglish
      8•2 months ago

      Just set up pandoc and Bob’s your uncle. It’ll convert markdown to anything. You’ll never have to open another word processor.

      • southsamurai
        7•2 months ago

        Nice! Thanks for the tip!

        Edit: holy shit, how have I never run across that before? That’s a brilliant program right there.

        • HandlesEnglish
          4•2 months ago

          Pandoc + [your markdown editor of choice] is magic. Some editors even come with Pandoc as a dependency so you can export to more or less anything from the GUI. I think GhostWriter and Zettlr at least (I honestly can’t be sure, I’ve changed editors so often and now I just have some Pandoc conversion scripts in my file manager menu).

    • Dessalines
      5•2 months ago

      For sure, I bet full fledged editors like word don’t even let you import it.

      • southsamurai
        2•2 months ago

        Not correctly, no. Librewriter does a bit better, but still misses some bits

      • southsamurai
        4•2 months ago

        Because it isn’t doc is docx.

        Publishers are pissy about such things. Even self publishing (which is what I do now), the various outlets still have limits to what they will use. Amazon accepts something like three file formats, including their own, and pdf isn’t on the list.

        I could just do pdf for directly giving them away to people, but even then, epub is usually a better pick in terms of readability since that’s the standard for actual books since ereaders tend to display it better than pdfs. Most people reading books via files would be using something that can give a better experience with epub vs pdf.