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A comment on Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet. Parent comment

Re:Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly t... by dekhn on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @05:19PM (#11293095)
I wasn't defending LaTeX; I don't use it any more.

I am certainly aware that many scientists don't want to publish their code out of embarrassment. It was a surprise to me, but I've heard that feedback.

I investigated various alternatives after I found LaTeX too arcane, including DocBook. It's still not entirely clear what solution exists to the collection of problems I have (want to semantically mark up my paper, want it to display nicely regardless of screen, etc).

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Re:Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly t... by eru on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @07:16PM (#11293783)
What about something like markdown plus some syntax for formulas? You can compile the markdown (via a detour to LaTeX perhaps) to something that looks nice.
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Re:Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly t... by dekhn on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @07:55PM (#11293970)
Yeah, some form of enhanced markdown, with self-rendering papers on github (or whatever-hub or whatever-xiv) seems like a very practical solution. It couples the paper's representation to the version control system in a way that could be convenient and expressive.
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Re:Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly t... by dorfsmay on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @02:03AM (#11295357)
Markdown gets very limited very quickly.

Are you aware of pandoc?

http://pandoc.org/

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Re:Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly t... by cbd1984 on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @01:27AM (#11295238)
I figure that any markdown dialect enhanced far enough to be usable would be as complex as LaTeX, only without the tooling and pre-written macros.
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Re:Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly t... by dorfsmay on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @01:59AM (#11295346)
Enhanced versions of markdown are just turning it back into a full wiki language.
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