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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Interesting tool, but from the first video on the page it looks like you have to write in markdown and then look at the wysiwyg window to see what your output would be like.

That seems backwards to me, if the target is writers. A better tool would let you create in a wysiwyg MS Word-like editor, but save all docs as markdown.

I don't want to have to remember the whole markdown syntax.

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That's indeed backwards (though I'd argue even for non-writers), but then why in your suggested workflow would you use markdown instead of a more efficient and richer document format?

For better diffability, and KISS. No need to go fancy. Fewer possibilities hopefully lead to more consistency.

What is KISS about XML and "more complicated elements" that this editor is doing? Also the land of markdowns is notoriously inconsistent

As the other comment says, for better diffability, but also it's good to store the document in a "neutral" format and then render for the eventual display - MS Word, PDF, HTML.

If you store Markdown in a database it would be easier to full text index and update as well EG "We've changed our Product Name to SuperWidget from MidWidget. We need to do a global find and replace on all our docs."

For the writers markdown diffability is bad since it mixes style and content

Strange to call markdown neutral given how it's tied to HTML, and that you could just as well convert your "non-neutral" rich format to the same targets

How is Markdown _Super_<span style="color:blue">Widget</span> easier to globally find&replace vs. anything else that you create an index for in a database?

I'm sure Markdown isn't perfect, but when you mentioned a "richer document format" I assumed you meant something like MS Word docx or rtf files.

If not markdown, what would you suggest?

Yes, those two would work better for the writers since then they'd be able to WYSIWYG-edit individual documents in other editors while having the potentially better style/content diffability/batch renaming etc in this one (and that would also help avoid the common mistake of having two separate views just because the underlying format is plaintexty)

Although personally I hope for a modern rich-text CRDT-based format that would also enable collaboration, but don't know of any specific one in that area

> If not markdown, what would you suggest?

Not as rich as LaTeX but more powerful than Markdown: .rst and .adoc

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