![]() The CommonMark is definitely more readable, but Markdown is just so sparse by design that every time I tried to use it for anything more serious than e.g. But the Markdown source is more readable the indentation makes clear the structure of the list in a way that mirrors how it would be displayed in a browser or on the page. Note that the AsciiDoc is at least as easy to write, perhaps easier, because you don't need to worry about indentation. This list is nested and does not require explicit item continuation. This paragraph belongs to item two of the outer list.ġ. This paragraph is part of the preceding list item.Ī. ![]() List item two continued with an open block. List item continued with a third paragraph.Ģ. List item one continued with a second paragraph followed by an Here's an example involving nested lists, from the AsciiDoc manual: AsciiDoc has different priorities, and it sacrifices the readability of the source document to get them. As John Gruber emphasizes in his Markdown documentation, Markdown emphasizes ease of reading in source format. I also want to emphasize something that is often not mentioned in comparisons of Markdown and AsciiDoc. That's a deal-breaker for many academics. For example, I didn't see any way to include multiple paragraphs (or other block content) in an AsciiDoc footnote. I don't have much experience with AsciiDoc, but I've encountered other limitations in writing pandoc's AsciiDoc renderer. If you want to target both, then maybe you need two different source documents? ![]() Similarly for math: pandoc actually converts your LaTeX math to MathML (for formats that like that) or to native Word equations (for docx) in AsciiDoc, as I understand it, your LaTeX math will work if you target LaTeX, but if you want MathML you need to put MathML in the source. In AsciiDoc, as I understand it, if you want automatic citation support you need to use LaTeX, and then you're limited to output in LaTeX and PDF. Pandoc's citation support is output-format independent: you can write the citations, specify a CSL stylesheet and bibliography, and you'll get the same output in every format pandoc supports. Let's just compare support for math and citations, for example. Sadly AsciiDoc doesn't seem to have experienced a similar growth spurt in terms of popularity amongst developers, and as a result have a bit more friction to use.ĪsciiDoc is a nice project, but I think that pandoc's variant of Markdown has a lot of advantages over AsciiDoc for academic writing. This is in addition to with rendering support in basically every note-taking tool. I've also recently found out that TeXpad "mysteriously" formats Markdown syntax in the editor, and builds an in-editor TOC of it. I'm thinking of something like Scrivener/Ulysses which is really great for project writing and has robust markdown support while writing. If I had to do conversions or had to start from scratch, I would have just started another LaTeX Document, and then this project wouldn't be here.Īs an aside aside: I personally think that one shortcoming of AsciiDoc is that Markdown ended up having a more mature application ecosystem outside of the most general purpose text-editing tools. This project just simply grew into an experiment on how to get the least hack-y looking source document for what I needed.īasically, I had a bunch of existing Markdown stuff typed with both my phone and my computer using NValt (already using the double-backtick math syntax as a hack), and I was looking for a way to reuse all that. The syntax only worked in Markdown at the time, so I went with that. bst files and Natbib author/year syntax with existing Bibtex database files, while also using CSL to format to everything else was pretty key. It was just serendipity that when I was looking to convert a bunch of my existing Markdown notes to papers, John happened to add (at Martin Fenner's urging) pretty robust support for citations to Pandoc. To be honest, there was never really any conscious decision to pick Markdown over AsciiDoc. Hopefully they add it to Github pages some time soon. I retract that comment and regret the error. Well, I did not realize Github has had AsciiDoctor integration for two years now (I've been doing most of my scientific work in GitLab during that time).
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