[conspire] markdown and pandoc

[Nick Moffitt]

Dan Bikle:
> Generally for me,
> Higher Level is better.
> LyX now on my Radar.

I have to say that I like "higher-level" markup specifically in that I
prefer my source text to be as legible and readable as possible.  To
that end I can't stand HTML's requirement that you insert a flurry of
tags with awkward-to-type </> characters just to make a new paragraph.
I would always start with something that respects a blank line as a
paragraph separator.  

I've come to enjoy pandoc, which uses an advanced dialect of markdown
as its preferred source markup language.  It supports some of the
features of TeX/LaTeX (bibliographic citations, for example) that aren't
in pure markdown, but it won't do everything.  

But for the most part, pandoc source documents look just like 
1990s Usenet ascii-only markup traditions.  You have *italics* and
**bold** and > for quoted matter, and indentation has the effects you'd
hope for.

You can specify custom templates for each of the output formats (HTML,
LaTeX->PDF, epub, etc.) if you need better styling.  A friend of mine
has been working on a no-nonsense stylesheet for the sort of bare HTML
pandoc spits out:

	https://gitorious.org/typesetter-css
	(live examples at http://zork.net/~st/typesetter/ )

The goal of this project is to set good typographical defaults for
things, rather than splash art-school design elements all over the
place.  I kind of wish I could reliably insert this stuff into my
browser defaults somehow!

One other nice thing is that pandoc actually *parses* the markdown,
instead of just being a match-and-pray series of regexes (as is the
original markdown reference implementation).  This is really helpful in
its goal of being a translator between formats.  You can even feed in an
HTML document and have it spit out mostly-correct markdown for you.  I
wonder if I can use that as my reader for the odd html-only mail...

I used to like reST (as used by Python projects for documentation), but
the HTML spat out by the docutils processors is really uncomfortable to
work with in CSS.

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