> It is ideal for creating product or API documentation, tutorials, course materials or anything that requires a clean, easily navigable and customizable presentation.
Markdown is really crap for any of that.
Any real writer knows that the best way to communicate an idea quickly and effectively is to present it the right way. Markdown does not have good presentation. It was not designed for good presentation. It was designed to write an incredibly basic-looking document, such that the plaintext and rendered document look similar.
I know this is going to be a shock to everyone. But it turns out that ASCII isn't the best way to encode presentation. On behalf of the poor SOBs that have to read what you churn out: Please stop subjecting people to your shitty presentation and get a real document format. Thanks.
I disagree. All it takes is a CSS file, some semantic HTML in the right places and some inline Mermaid diagrams and you have a pretty decent document. I routinely write one-pagers, memos and architecture summaries in Markdown and generate PDFs with weasyprint (or even just iOS’s print to PDF feature), and all I use is a print CSS file and whatever JS is required to render the diagrams.
I would love to not use a browser engine at all (and moderately detest Mermaid because it cannot work fully in-memory without instantiating one), but it works.
> *Note:* my complete disregard for <blockquote> semantics because I wanted to put a box around something, but my lightweight syntax doesn’t offer richer features
Markdown is really crap for any of that.
Any real writer knows that the best way to communicate an idea quickly and effectively is to present it the right way. Markdown does not have good presentation. It was not designed for good presentation. It was designed to write an incredibly basic-looking document, such that the plaintext and rendered document look similar.
I know this is going to be a shock to everyone. But it turns out that ASCII isn't the best way to encode presentation. On behalf of the poor SOBs that have to read what you churn out: Please stop subjecting people to your shitty presentation and get a real document format. Thanks.