I'm an author and an software engineer. I can see why Markdown could be slightly better for a writer - but not much better - and honestly it seems like a step down for an editor.
Primarily, all a writer does is write plain text. Probably less than 1% of sentences are anything other than plain text.
There's not a lot of headings or titles. There's not a lot of italics or bold text.
What else is there? What am I missing? What's the benefit?
You just sold everyone on markdown. This is the whole point. All the crap MS Word adds to support formatting and visual styles is in the way. With markdown you focus on the actual text. Exactly what an author should want to.
What exactly does MS Word add over markdown which matters to an author? I am talking about the writing experience. You could always export to docx.
A table of contents you don't have to manually maintain. Built-in interface to insert special characters you can't type with the keyboard. Automatic grammar checks. Auto-corrections. Macros. All of the above in one program instead of a hodge-podge of programs. Being able to send and receive documents from people with no conversion needed.
No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?
"What does MS Word offer over Markdown" isn't a good question, because they're not the same thing -- Word is a program and Markdown is a file type. There's nothing that stops a Markdown-based editor from having a full set of features. I've very rarely felt that I was missing out on features when using iA Writer or Ulysses compared to a word processor, although occasionally I wished for either the kind of document juggling that Scrivener is so good at or actual full-blown text editor features like BBEdit. But I haven't reached for an old school word processor as my first choice as a composition tool in... probably 15 years. And I definitely do write a lot.
The most obvious WYSIWYG competitor for novelWriter is Scrivener, which is similar to Ulysses -- and also shares the limitation that it can only export to Word rather than import. Nevertheless, its testimonials page is filled with praise from people who arguably write more than I do. :)
Writing a table of contents is my formatters job, not mine. It takes place after both my editor and my proofreader have completed their jobs, at which point I don't touch the file any more. If you format your own, then you're already in an small niche.
Some people may need "special characters" they can't type, but I have keybindings for the characters I use.
Grammar checking and corrections is my proofreaders job, not mine. It happens after I've converted my document and sent it off.
Macros are supported in pretty much every editor I've ever used for plain-text. I use lots of macros, but exactly zero of them for my novels.
I don't need to send and receive documents with no conversion needed. I do one export when I'm done with my first draft, and then I edit and do one more export before handing it over to my proofreader. Then, sure, I review those changes in Librewriter. The proportion of my time that takes is tiny. It'd be nice not to have to, but I'd take that over having to work in a word processor during writing any day.
> No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?
As someone who has written several novels, that's how your comment came across to me. At the same time I know novelists range from the pen and paper type (e.g. Gaiman, King to give two examples discussed in this thread) up to wanting word processors with all bells and whistles - it's very much down to taste.
* Inserting special characters: personally I don't find those "character choosing" windows to be very convenient. Hunt and peck is a slow way to type! Anyway, you can do this in Markdown with either Unicode (if you have the right keyboard) or you can write HTML escape codes (&tm; etc.)
* Automatic (grammar/spelling). I don't like check as I type, but sure. Anyway, Emacs provides this if I want it.
* Macros. Hello? Emacs? (Also, Pandoc has a scripting interface.)
I may not be published yet but I've written my own book. I've also published books for other people. I did both of those with a Markdown-based toolchain. It works.
The "inserting special characters" one is a bit of a "eh?" for most of us Mac users, I think, since most special characters can be typed using the Option key and the character chooser (which is indeed not very convenient!) is system-wide and should work in a native build of at least the GUI version of Emacs. But, yep -- Markdown and Word aren't the same categories of things. How comfortable your Markdown editing experience is depends on how comfortable your Markdown editor is.
(Also, I wrote a Markdown-to-ePub script, too! Although I don't think anything I've got up online uses it anymore.)
Why would I want to write my first draft in a different tool than my subsequent drafts? Nobody cares about visual styles, but my editor sends back their thoughts with inline edits and comments in Word. It's so much easier to edit in Word. I'm a huge Markdown fan, but it raises the question:
What does Markdown get me that makes it worth switching to for the first draft only?
Many writers intentionally separate tooling to force workflows, even at the point of great inconvenience if it provides for an environment they feel is more conducive to writing. This is generally far more important than whether or not getting it into a format that editors can work with is extra effort or not.
Hemingway famously favoured pencils for his first draft and switched to typewriter for his second.
Gaiman and Stephen King uses pens for at least their first drafts. Gaiman expressly for the reason that he believes it force him to be more thoughtful and forces him to go back and rewrite the full book word for word rather than going back and forth to edit. King switched to pens after his car accident.
JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter with pen on loose sheaf paper.
Writing novels is intensely personal, to the point where writers will insist on specific brands of pens or specific models of typewriters. E.g. Danielle Steele has used 1946 Olympia's throughout her entire career.
i am probably the wrong person to respond because the reason i prefer a plain text editor is that that's what i have been using for all my work until now.
i am not yet there in the process, but i won't be using plain text/markdown just for the first draft.
when i get back that word documents with comments from the editor, i'll look at that like a read-only copy, and actually make the required edits in that same plain text editor.
while it may be easier to make edits right in place in the word document, it is easier (for me at least) to keep a history of changes with plain text documents.
otherwise i'd agree with you. if you are going to end up editing in word, may as well start with editing in word. for me the goal is to avoid using word/libreoffice at all.
From your parent's comment, I think this is the key statement:
> what an author should want
That is normative / prescriptive attitude, and seems to gatekeep who gets called "an author."
On the other hand, I think the biggest challenges most writers have is getting words on (digital) paper, regardless of the software.
I am also unconvinced that there are any practical benefits (for me) to using Markdown in particular, instead of whatever is closest to hand and offers the least friction...use what works for you!
MS Word does add word processing. E.g. your straight quotes will be contextually converted to the correct left/right quote, your hyphens can become em-dashes, etc.
Ha! This is a really interesting perspective—I think you're saying, "it's all plain text, so there's no advantage to using Markdown instead of docx".
I think others have an opposite view, but on the same grounds. The argument seems to be: it's all plain text, so docx is overkill, so markdown is more technically efficient!
There's some benefit to using the tool I know best (emacs, for me), so it's nice to use a "native" format that also gives me my usual keybindings, macros, etc.
But there's no doubt it just offloads the inefficiency to a different step of the process. I'm more comfortable with inputting text, but it requires post-hoc reformatting, and I'd have to use a different word processor for post-editor changes...
The "markdown is a more efficient solution from a technical perspective" argument doesn't hold a lot of weight with me...the practical overhead of docx is minimal, so unless you prize technical purity over all else, I don't think there _is_ a benefit.
The benefit is the rest of the pure text toolchain. Like being able to use Git. I can confirm, for example, how long a typo has existed in my book by looking at the Git history. Maybe that's a bit academic, but you get the point. I have the complete history of everything I've ever written.
Another example: because formatting is reified in Markdown, I can grep for it. Did I misuse italics? With one command I can find every single place where I used italics in my entire book. I don't think you can even do that in Word. Good luck reading a multi-hundred page manuscript to find all of the places you may have made the same mistake.
Another example: Word provides styles, but honestly, who has discipline to use them? Most people I know manually insert page breaks, centered text, and X number blank spaces at the top of a page to make a new chapter. In Markdown, all of my markup gets converted into Word styles automatically and then I can create a reference doc to apply the style I want. I'm writing semantically correct styles in my documents all the time with no additional effort.
Well, to be fair, MS Word maintains a full history of every edit that was made.
And, find-and-replace for specific formatting is supported out-of-the-box.
Finally, cmd-i / cmd-u / cmd-b are pretty easy default bindings, and setting up shortcuts for more intricate, specific styles is straightforward in Word.
I share your preference for using an efficient tool—I'm a die-hard md+git practitioner. But the "most people I know" argument is not a good basis for rejecting real, rich features in software that works well for other people.
I am also curious: why do you care about semantic correctness? It's OK if that's just your preference, but it's not something that moves the needle for me....I'm not sure why I should care!
(edit to add: my comment sounds glib and a little sharper that I intended. That wasn't my intent!)
Or alternatively you can sort of hack it with track changes, but it's not automatic and there is a long list of caveats. In short, track changes is really intended for a single round of changes on top of a base document, not for permanently tracking the changes on a document over its entire lifetime:
Now maybe a Word expert will come along and tell me how to do it properly. :-) But even if they do that sort of proves my point, which is that Word is a large, complex piece of software and even if it hypothetically supports some feature, doesn't make it intuitive or easy to use in that way. (Or that you won't hit a bunch of corner cases when you try to use it.)
I do stand corrected about the find-replace formatting, so thanks for that. But on the other hand, I don't think it really contradicts my point either.
To be clear, I do think Word serves its user base! For low- to moderate- tech savvy users, it's does exactly what it needs to. And I'm not saying everyone should switch to Markdown. But for those of us who have the technical chops to go beyond it, there are some real advantages to working with other tools that shouldn't be discounted.
Well said! Though, I would say that this statement is a good description of git, too:
> a large, complex piece of software and even if it hypothetically supports some feature, doesn't make it intuitive or easy to use in that way. (Or that you won't hit a bunch of corner cases when you try to use it.)
A takeaway I get from this entire conversation is that the real pain point is not the drafting stage, but the editing stage. The latter is (a) collaborative, with (b) non-technical stakeholders...there doesn't seem to be a good way to both use my favorite editor, AND play nicely w my editor's stack (or lack thereof).
Good thing I don't have an editor...that would require me to actually write things :D
But if you cared about the history, why wouldn't you always turn them on by default? "Full history" in git is also an opt-in model for maintaining a history...
I write books in Vim. The way I work is that I do it all in plaintext until the final edit. Only after that do I add formatting (could be .docx or Markdown or whatever the editor expects).
What happens when your editor requests changes? How are those edits communicated to you, and how do you integrate them back into plaintext?
(Serious question—a big pain point for me is the choice between using my preferred tool to start, then switching to a bad tool later; or, using a bad tool the entire time)
All edits in plaintext on both sides until the final draft. Yes, I know this isn't the standard way of doing things but it isn't so much because I'm a Vim cultist or anything. It's only because I can yank, insert, and navigate the text so much faster than with something like Pages, MS Word, or Scrivener.
Another way that seems to work well for some writers and editors is a shared Google Doc.
This sounds silly but as an author myself it's extremely important that I know what the story looks like to a final reader while I write it. It's like dogfooding my own prose. Too many short paragraphs, or too many long ones, or strange gaps, etc. are much more evident to me in docx or scrivener or any other text processor.
I could never get over Markdown; Markdown doesn't show me the user experience of my own code(writing), while word and scrivener will show me instantly.
Consider a book like The Lord of the Rings. It has gone through countless revisions and corrections. With markdown and git you could track those changes and corrections over time.
Yes, you or I could...but Tolkien was much busier writing and world-building, and I seriously doubt George Allen & Unwin (the publishers) would have acceded to conditions on how the manuscript was sent to them!
Primarily, all a writer does is write plain text. Probably less than 1% of sentences are anything other than plain text.
There's not a lot of headings or titles. There's not a lot of italics or bold text.
What else is there? What am I missing? What's the benefit?