Comment by Stwerp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stwerp | Hacker News Reader

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I've been living in Emacs + Auctex for a while now, so my questions about markdown/pandoc: I have grown very accustomed to regex (and normal) searches on my bibtex/reference database and easily plugging in citations in my document. Is there support for this (reftex) in any of the markdown editors? I don't know if I've seen a good solution to this.

The other thing is preview-latex which inline-png's all equations, section titles and images in the emacs buffer. This is very valuable to me to easily see a figure without needing to tab between windows. I don't think markdown would support something like this, as far as I'm aware.

I like the idea of complete separation of content and appearance/layout, but Latex has many customizations (psfrag for image text replacement, tikz, programming custom macros) that I would be somewhat lost without. For instance, I start all my outlines in org-mode, and love having quick html, or tex->pdf output, but for the real nitty-gritty content, I _need_ my straight latex code.

Citations: Pandoc has its own format for citations that it translates to LaTeX etc as needed. Most Markdown editors I have seen or used don't have any support for pandoc's extended features. So while I am sure this could be possible with work on Emacs (or vim, or whatever) I'm not aware of anything that does what you do out of the box. Personally, I am writing in Byword (with some tweaks in macvim as necessary) and storing/looking up citations in BibDesk.

Same deal with preview-latex - you can include LaTeX directly in pandoc documents, but no editor I know of will do previews of it for you. I do think that is an awesome feature though.

Overall I think the audience for Markdown is people who don't want to get down in the weeds with, say, LaTeX and Emacs like you do. Thus, the feature set for Markdown-focused editors is still fairly simple. Pandoc is useful because it lets you add a layer of complexity on top of your Markdown as necessary (through templates) and get it into different formats easily. (The same can probably be said for other Markdown systems like MultiMarkdown but I like Pandoc) I have managed to set up my workflow to get Pandoc-flavored markdown into an apa6 LaTeX template without any significant issues, due to pandoc being fairly flexible, but it's not quite at WYSIWYG-style writing just yet.

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