[conspire] The simpler life

[Nick Moffitt]

Don Marti:
> Pandoc is great.  If you read this...  http://practicaltypography.com/
> ...and want to make some of the methods there work without too much
> extra tweaking and relying on the "Compose" key (
> http://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.html) then
> pandoc conversion of CommonMark to HTML is the thing.

I currently use pandoc's own native markdown defaults with the options
you can see at <http://zork.net/~nick/.podcast/Makefile>.  In particular
`--smart` switches on exactly this sort of UTF-8 quote-curling logic.

> (CommonMark is the attempt to make Markdown more consistent between
> sites and tools.  It would be especially welcome for Pandoc, ikiwiki,
> and GitHub Pages not to have annoying inconsistencies.  The author of
> Pandoc is the main author of the CommonMark spec.
> https://github.com/jgm/CommonMark)

It does seem to me that McFarlane's goal is to make CommonMark the new
baseline for pandoc markdown, with things that didn't make it in pushed
to non-default options.

The spec has been pretty stable for the past six months or so, but is
still actively developed.