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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

I just wonder why Markdown (or whatever alike, I know there are alternatives superior in numerous ways) is not the default format for books, documents and everything. Some years ago I switched to Typora and discovered I hardly ever need Word/Writer for anything I write and I only use it to open documents others would send me. 90% of books I read don't look like having a serious reason for not being in the Markdown format either. I understand there is typesetting one has to do to print a nice-looking paper book but the majority of the text read on a computer/smartphone or printed from MS/Libre Office lacks this job done anyway.

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Markdown is a really poor storage format. There is quasi-official standard (CommonMark), but since it's feature-poor, people mostly use something else, like GitHub Markdown. Individual apps often extend Markdown in various incompatible ways.

There are better alternatives (e.g. AsciiDoc, but it's specialized towards documentation), but they don't have anything close to the momentum of Markdown.

> 90% of books I read don't look like having a serious reason for not being in the Markdown format either.

Markdown is a late comer to the game, so the better question is - why should books be in Markdown? Markdown's biggest (or the only?) advantage compared to binary/XML based formats is sort-of readability in plain text, but that's just not that important for the majority of publishers and readers.

> Markdown is a really poor storage format. There is quasi-official standard (CommonMark), but since it's feature-poor, people mostly use something else, like GitHub Markdown. Individual apps often extend Markdown in various incompatible ways.

I hope GitHub and Obsidian are going to synchronise their MarkDown extensions in near future and this will become The Standard. Whatever a case, anybody can easily write a script to automatically convert any Markdown flavour to another.

> why should books be in Markdown? Markdown's biggest (or the only?) advantage compared to binary/XML based formats is sort-of readability in plain text, but that's just not that important for the majority of publishers and readers.

Read anywhere. I mean anywhere. Without a need for software as complex and resource-hungry as a web browser engine ePub would require. I used to read TXT books on a pocket MP3 player during the pre-Android era. Also very easy automated processing.

In fact my actual preferred format for books is FB2. I mostly convert ePub books to FB2 to read on a PocketBook eInk device because it would use book-specified fonts and pages (which I never want) if I don't and FB2 is sort-of Markdown-like (in terms of its logic and features) XML. FB2 also has a great metadata section to store information about the book.

And besides books there also are documets. Word/LibreOffice documents others would send me often are real pain to modify as WYSIWYG word processors bundle tons of redundant invisible formatting details for every bit of text even when not asked for.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ©

> Without a need for software as complex and resource-hungry as a web browser engine ePub would require.

I know that technology purists love that, but any electronic reading device handles HTML easily (especially the simple HTML in ePubs).

The point becomes moot when your book contains images/illustrations and you (like a normal reader) want to view them within the content. You will use some Markdown formatter/viewer which is again based on browser.

> Word/LibreOffice documents others would send me often are real pain to modify as WYSIWYG word processors bundle tons of redundant invisible formatting details for every bit of text even when not asked for.

Markdown is just insufficient for any non-trivial document. There isn't any standard way to set image size for example. There's no standard way to create even rudimentary tables.

> “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Then go for plain text. All those headings and asterisks are a distraction anyway. Years ago, many e-books used to be distributed in plain text in fact.

> Then go for plain text. All those headings and asterisks are a distraction anyway. Years ago, many e-books used to be distributed in plain text in fact.

Markdown is more semantic. E.g. it gives you a ToC (a very important feature of a good book, and it has to be semantic markup-based when you decouple the text from the view by omitting explicit pagination) for free.

HTML is also semantic. It also has a good standard, its support is omnipresent, is extensible, actually supports tables etc.

Isn't Markdown meant to be lightweight HTML with shortcuts to declutter it visually? Afaik it even is considered officially correct to use HTML tags in it when necessary.

There is a lot of nuance and complication to typesetting books that isn't apparent to an untrained observer, and markdown + css simply isn't sophisticated enough to handle it. Even html/css + js is technically capable but far far behind the state of the art in digital typesetting.

This is also a very classic "well I could do it better" engineer trap so please don't assume that without some research. It's an ancient domain relative to what we're talking about here and has accumulated a lot of valuable insight & technique that should not be simply discarded because markdown is almost good enough for some things.

Do you have recommendations? (La)TeX, maybe, or *roff?

I don't have any professional typesetting experience, just some adjacency from having done some work for a type foundry at one point, that gave me some insight into how much actually goes into it.

Most professionals use expensive professional software for it. Latex or pollen or other pure markup solutions only work for smallish documents, or digital ones. Once you're going to print, esp in different formats, you need to care about page imposition, aligning with folios & signatures, widows & orphans etc. Just generally the physical reality of paper leaking into your abstraction of "the book" in ways markup alone can't accommodate.

That looks like a great tool!

I write a lot of documentation as part of my job and having Markdown side by side with the rendered output is great. Once you get the hang of the syntax, markdown is so much faster to write than using any text editor like Word. Just writing a list in text editors is painful.

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