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A comment on Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system. Parent comment

Re:Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system by pling on Saturday July 12, 2014 @08:03AM (#8024350)
Docx and Odt will live forever. 99% of the population will continue to use them. Hell I write hundreds of pages of documentation every year in Word 2010 and use LibreOffice at home because its easy. I use LaTeX for anything that is 'published'.

I hope we don't get another YML, an inferior and minute subset of XML's capabilities with all its problems and none of its advantages and tooling. I've used XML for years and once you understand it properly it's fine.

Call me old school but I find lightweight markup to be a hack job.

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Re:Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system by nmrm on Saturday July 12, 2014 @09:54AM (#8024538)
> Call me old school but I find lightweight markup to be a hack job.

The best way to think of it is that markdown is a replacement for .txt. It's not a typesetting language, it's just a conventional way to structure text documents.

Most of the elements of markdown are already there in .txt files from the 80s and 90s. All markup does is standardize how to do headers, lists, code blocks and bold/italic so that you can generate documents that actually contain those elements, but could also just treat a markdown file as a normal .txt.

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