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The Huddle All About Markdown!

Information about our weekly Writers' Huddle
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AgentPete

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You may have heard about Markdown, the decades-old writing environment that’s suddenly becoming fashionable. What is, exactly? And is it for you?

I’m delighted to show below a portion of last Saturday’s Huddle (the first time we’ve let cameras in) in which Litopian @Ed Simnett tells us about his experiences using this intriguing anti-Word word processor. Many thanks to Ed for staying up past midnight to do this – I hope you find it as interesting as we did… and if you’re not already coming to Huddles, now is a good time to start!
(NB - you may want to go full screen to view)

 
What it does, I think, is to open up a few more options for writers. There’s not enough discussion about the impact of the writing environment on what’s actually written (I did ask Ed about that, above). EG I have a client who still works in MS-DOS because it’s suits them just fine (MS-DOS is pretty similar to markdown, really).

Personally, I find I’m moving away from ever more complex (and expensive) writing tools. Libre Office Writer is now my default word processor, altho I still have a subscription to Office… which may lapse soon, I think. The writing environment in Libre Office Writer is suitably old school (think Word several iterations ago). I heartily dislike having to learn a new interface just because MS need to keep “innovating" their product (and is CoPilot really an innovation? Maybe we hit “peak word processing” a few years ago…?)
:) p.
 
I too am currently using Libre Office and there are good reasons: a simple menu structure and excellent file conversion abilities. However, I keep running into problems with the way it forces style sheets on every document. The worst case example is when you have a hundred different small documents (recipes? guidebook entries?), each with a slightly different style sheet (because they were typed on different machines) and you join them together as a single master document. At that point, there's so much style information that the document will be a mess. If your smaller component documents had no style sheet at all, they'll blend easily in master document.

It boils down to "what is the lightest weight text editor I can get?" For linux? For Windows? For Mac? How stripped down can it be?
 
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The worst case example is when you have a hundred different small documents (recipes? guidebook entries?), each with a slightly different style sheet (because they were typed on different machines) and you join them together as a single master document.
Never thought about that, but it does sound chronic.
It boils down to "what is the lightest weight text editor I can get?" For linux? For Windows? For Mac? How stripped down can it be?
You might be a good candidate for markdown, then.

From what I understood of Ed’s talk, there is a certain tech challenge right at the start. Depending on your tolerance for tech, that might, or might not, be a problem. Basically, you’ve got to decide on some sort of editor – Ed demonstrated Visual Studio Code, but there are lots of others (GhostWriter looks pretty good, and seems to be made with writers, not just coders, in mind).
 
Reading the posts and watching the video, I was stunned to see that my "tolerance for tech" is far higher than many of the other people here. This may be because the work I do is automatically a combination of different formats. Ideally, I should be able to type up basic documents without any pre-loaded styles on keyboard devices that can be easily tossed into a rucksack for a field trip on public transit. Then, I might also use a "real" laptop to type outside the house and process photos too.

Once I've got those files: text, photos, graphics, and perhaps things I haven't yet thought of - I can easily combine them using the Master Document feature in Libre Office. Assuming there are no embedded codes in the earlier work, the Master Document will apply a single style to the whole thing and then output it in any format you wish. I've got the output mastered, it's the input that's dragging me down.
 
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