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A comment on Markdown is the Future of Writing. Parent comment

Re:Markdown is the Future of Writing by ghayes on Friday September 13, 2013 @02:08AM (#6378935)
The issue with Markdown is the syntax is pretty horrible. To create a link, it's [ title ] ( url ), which is incredibly unintuitive. I'm still never sure if italics are or * *. Heck, if I want a single newline, that's not possible. I am all for using a markup syntax; I just wish we had a better option than Markdown specifically.

Additionally, Medium is specifically, heavily concerned with "how it looks" as that is one of the main selling points of the blog software.

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Re:Markdown is the Future of Writing by dchest on Friday September 13, 2013 @03:05AM (#6379088)
A single newline is possible, and it's the most horrible thing in Markdown:

   When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown,
   you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p
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Re:Markdown is the Future of Writing by koralatov on Friday September 13, 2013 @03:26AM (#6379141)
Agreed. It's an appalling kludge, and I bet most of these ``distraction-free writing environments'' (vomit) don't highlight the extra trailing spaces in any way.

I have the following in my .vimrc which at least makes them visible:

  set listchars=tab:»\ ,eol:¬,trail:·
Of course, having them visible doesn't change the fact that they're an appalling kludge and I still tend to use <br /> instead.
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Re:Markdown is the Future of Writing by computeloops on Friday September 13, 2013 @02:23AM (#6378980)
reStructuredText is another option. It is quite powerful, but the syntax is little complex compared to Markdown.

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

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Re:Markdown is the Future of Writing by backprojection on Friday September 13, 2013 @02:44AM (#6379028)
Silly question: shouldn't be piss-simple to write with whatever syntax you like and parse it to markdown, with tools like Python?
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