It includes a rich text mode for easier collaboration with non-LaTeX users [2], and you can also write in Markdown if you like :) [3].
Feedback always appreciated if you do give it a try, thanks.
I really like how easy it is to experiment with the LaTeX formatting (something I wasnt super familiar with) and immediately see the output.
I had someone send me their resume template on overleaf and it was super easy to get a similar product with my personal touch.
The only feedback I would have is it was a little awkward to do folders within folders (this was a few months ago) and I had to ken the "hey put a path separator in the name" before I got it.
Good luck with your future projects!
[1]: http://pandoc.org/
Format is dirt simple: date alone on a line is the only special element. The main thing I really miss is the ability to scribble drawings inline.
Python has a lovely library for it and combined with jinja you can get a hell of a long way in a couple of hundred lines of python as a static site generator.
I just did essentially the same, in reStructuredText.
The battle is so lost that I don't even bother fighting it, but there are many nice things about reST: you have to explicitly escape html to get it passed through as html (feature/bug), tables are easy, especially the list tables, I'm used to it (feature? bug?), ...
It's like DocBook with Markdown like syntax
I used to use OneNote for everything, until I moved to Macs... Not only there was no Mac version at first, OneNote STILL doesn't let you import old local notebooks into the Mac version.
With Ulysses/Quiver at least I know that what I write on the Mac will still be readable on Windows/Linux..
And plain text is itself a nightmare to parse and do anything beyond reading it as a block.
Imagine it wasn't decided on Markdown. E.g.: I don't use markdown when making plain-text notes. I make it all hierarchical and indent using "- ". I.e. headings are top-level, sub-headings are indented by one, and so on. Eventually, you realize that all things can be represented as just lists of nested lists. No need for some arbitrary "heading" type, just nest it all based on the concept.
Obviously it's not harder to parse than a PDF.
If someone told me they needed me to parse a "plain text" file, to me it sounds like they'd want me to provide some statistics on an unstructured text blob.
Free form text does have properties, such as byte length, character count, word count, line count, sentence count, paragraph count, and so on. Most of which is simply variations on whitespace delimiters.
But an individual plain text file... all on its own? Could be a shell script? Could be a newspaper clipping? Could be a dictionary file? Could be an array of XYZ vertices, edges and faces? Could be all of the above, and an email signature at the end?
Someone tells me: "here have this plain text object," and I presume it is a monolithic blob of ASCII, if I'm lucky, and maybe it's War and Peace or Moby Dick expressed in emoji if I'm not.
Well, most would agree markdown is a plain text format for example, but it's not totally unstructured.
Still it's a bitch to parse compared to something like JSON.
Html or plaintext is all I trust now. A nice editor on top of it and I'm good. If you have to do larger document writing, I recommend Madcap Flare.
RestructuredText is very powerful, and has an official specification. Basically what Markdown is missing. Yet, it is plain text and easy to parse.
foo
======================
Quite possibly my biggest annoyance with rST/Sphinx is the hanging toctree issue, and poor support for multi-format images/figures.
The 100 % offline search in Sphinx is somewhat of a mixed bag and doesn't always give good results, though it's fine for reference works.
- Notepad
- Microsoft Word
- PDF
- Twiki
- Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML
- JIRA
- Raw HTML
- Markdown (several flavors)
With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.
I've been getting so tired of having to re-do stuff on different platforms that more of my docs are starting as Plaintext and then written in pseudocode markup for areas that I know will change on every platform (e.g. generating a table of contents, image tags, etc).
Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, except when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.
The docs of mine that seem most resilient to platform shifts (other than plaintext) are the ones that are written in or compiled to longstanding formats like LaTeX or HTML.
So perhaps my takeaway is, write in something readable that compiles to something widely available. That will provide the least headache.