
Markdeep markup language - aparashk
http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
======
rapnie
Markdeep has some very nice features. I love to be able to have more
expressiveness than in regular markdown.

But I am not so sure about the diagramming feature. Writing diagrams as ascii
art seems like a PITA to me, especially when you need to update a diagram with
new shapes, etc.

For this I prefer PlantUML markdown integration:
[http://plantuml.com](http://plantuml.com)

I use VS Code and it has a nice plugin to handle this.

~~~
jkabrg
What about freehand drawn diagrams? It seems pretty fast and intuitive, and
would deal with your problem* . Are there any tools for making freehand
diagrams look professional? It would be analogous to how Markdown makes
"crude" text look "professional".

* As long as you have good coordination.

~~~
paultopia
This is an interesting idea---how hard would it be to do this? It might be as
simple as doing k-means on the pixels or some other kind of clustering
algorithm, and then fitting a spline curve to each cluster...

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tannhaeuser
To go beyond generic Wiki syntax, SGML lets you define context-specific token
replacement rules. For example, to make SGML format a simplistic markdown
fragment into HTML, you could use an SGML prolog like this:

    
    
        <!DOCTYPE p [
          <!ELEMENT p - - ANY>
          <!ELEMENT em - - (#PCDATA)>
          <!ENTITY start-em '<em>'>
          <!ENTITY end-em '</em>'>
          <!SHORTREF in-p '*' start-em>
          <!SHORTREF in-em '*' end-em>
          <!USEMAP in-p p>
          <!USEMAP in-em em>
        ]>
        <p>The following text:
           *this*
           will be put into EM
           element tags</p>

~~~
agumonkey
so XML removed the best part of SGML..

~~~
JadeNB
XML was always intended more for machine than for human consumption. It's
easier for machines to consume extremely regular syntax, so that's what XML
has.

~~~
agumonkey
unfortunately it had its time as a pseudo programming language period..

~~~
JadeNB
> unfortunately it had its time as a pseudo programming language period..

You are quite right. I should probably have said something more like "XML was
intended _by its creators_ more for machine than human consumption" (and,
incidentally, creation; I think I have read that XML construction wasn't
really intended to be done by humans either).

------
rapnie
Something I haven't seen in any markdown editor so far (suggestions welcome)
is extended table support.

Say I have a table with a 'name' and 'value' column and 100 entries. And I'd
like names to be alphabetically sorted. So far so good.

But this table is too long and too small, so I want to have 4 columns and 50
rows, where the name/value continue in column 3, 4. Out of luck. This is
unmanageable, as you have to shift many cells when adding a new entry.

A proposal for something like this:
[https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1189](https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1189)

Also mentions multi-line cell contents, which are hard in regular markdown
(require inline html)..

~~~
duckerude
I think Emacs's org-mode can do that, by offering an easy way to insert
columns. It's not markdown, but at a glance, the table syntax seems compatible
or close enough, so maybe copy/pasting to and from Emacs could do the job if
you can stand Emacs.

org-mode's tables can do a lot of things.

[https://orgmode.org/org.html#Tables](https://orgmode.org/org.html#Tables)

~~~
rcthompson
I'm pretty sure Pandoc has an option to interpret org-mode style tables in
Markdown files, and Org-mode itself has a mode for editing tables in non-org
files. I haven't played with either, however, so I can't report on how well
they work.

------
s5ma6n
Well the whole point of markdown is that it is simple enough so that devs
easily document whatever necessary. As you know documentation is notoriously
neglected by the developers. But this is not that simple. I doubt it will be
adopted that much.

~~~
bnchrch
I'm not sure you realize how many blogs and website are written using
markdown.

~~~
alphakappa
I think the parent's point is that markdown is simple, but markdeep is not.

~~~
mort96
I think your parent's point was that Markdown is used in a lot of situations
where simplicity isn't as important as it is when documenting code.

------
sbjs
I really like the idea of a new markup format. To me markdown has been very
unintuitive in some ways. I can never remember whether more # means higher or
deeper header level. Or which of - - - or === makes a first or second level
header. But since markdown is first class citizen at github, I don’t think
we’ll ever be able to see any real competition rise up (even though github has
first class support for others, markdown is the clear winner). And I’ve never
heard anyone else mention these confusions so maybe everyone else is fine with
it and I’m the only one who wants an alternative.

~~~
type0
Asciidoc is a viable alternative. By now you have Asciidoctor in Ruby,
AsciidoctorJ on JVM, Asciidoctor.js and even original Asciidoc Python recently
rewritten for Py3.

[https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor.org/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor.org/blob/master/docs/_includes/asciidoc-
vs-markdown.adoc)

Here is a very short intro on rendering in your browser:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LOB3WeOUJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LOB3WeOUJk)

Asciidoc.org at some time in the future should be the page for the language
spec. The biggest feature is probably that you can produce DocBook and it's
very easy!

~~~
castillar76
We've been really happy with Asciidoc at work. We maintain multiple large
versioned documents as a team and had been using Word and 'Track Changes' to
do updates. We've now moved them entirely to Asciidoc and are using Git for
tracking and approving changes, and the difference is night and day. We
considered Markdown at the time, but things like numbered lists incorporating
paragraphs, metadata inclusion, and the need to specify certain elements about
the final published version meant that Asciidoc was a clear winner. To get all
of those incorporated using Markdown would have meant implementing one of the
Markdown dialects, and then ensuring that everyone's tool-chain that thought
it spoke Markdown wouldn't then munge it to death.

------
amai
Hartl’s Tenth Rule of Typesetting:

"Any sufficiently complicated typesetting system contains an ad hoc,
informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of LATEX."

Markdeep is no exception.

[http://manual.softcover.io/book/softcover_markdown#cha-
softc...](http://manual.softcover.io/book/softcover_markdown#cha-
softcover_flavored_markdown)

------
stewbrew
I really wish people would simply forget about markdown and restart with a
slightly more sensible and extensible markup. I personally always thought that
some sort of latex/context with a simple markup for common commands would be
more useful.

------
paultopia
This sounds pretty cool. My own workflow is so pandoc-dependent though that I
don't think I could use it unless someone who is much better at Haskell than I
am works the markdeep extensions into pandoc :-(

------
fernly
The day I find one of these mark* languages that supports poetry -- which
simply means, a section in which it respects literal indents and line-breaks,
but not by dropping into monospace font -- I'll use it.

N.B. the online publishing platform Leanpub has its own mark* variant,
"markua"[1] which actually does recognize a poem section -- although as
implemented it has minor formatting issues.

[1] [https://leanpub.com/markua/read](https://leanpub.com/markua/read)

~~~
ramses0
I've put together a book of poetry using CLI/markdown-ish tools. pandoc make
texlive-xetex is what's in the Dockerfile that builds it. If you contact me
directly I'd be willing to share how far I've gotten with the problem.

------
transfire
I think anyone would agree that Markdown the sna bit too simplistic, and while
Markdeep looks cool, it seems like it ends up at the opposite extreme with too
much complexity.

------
dang
From 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402121)

------
ivanceras
Similar [https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-
editor/](https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/)

~~~
disqard
Very cool. Thank you for making and sharing this!

------
writepub
Shameless plug: [http://write.pub](http://write.pub) supports most of the
features of MarkDeep, and allows WYSIWYG writing.

It also shows with built in version control, you don't have to know git to use
it

~~~
medntech
Is this just a wrapper for tui.editor?

~~~
writepub
The editor is indeed TUI. But TUI doesn't support editing/saving local files,
which write.pub allows.

There are multiple other features, like WYSIWYG diff and version control that
make this app compelling

~~~
medntech
That's awesome! I'm a huge fan of tui so I was curious.

------
nkkollaw
Markdown is cool because it's minimalistic.

Markdeep might be a good idea, but if you start adding more and more feature
you reimplement HTML, at that point why not simply use HTML? Isn't HTML plain
text, too?

~~~
bausshf
This was my thought when I saw the example on the frontpage with styling

------
theshadowknows
Is there some way of doing 3D diagrams?

------
janaagaard
Justified margins?

