

Ask HN: Can I write all my doco using markdown? - DamonOehlman

OK. I'm tired of having to use Word, Pages, whatever the word processor is when it just seems to get in the way of getting words and information down.<p>I coding and website land I have pretty much transitioned to using markdown everywhere thanks to (joDoc and Jekyll, Django's markdown support is helpful too), but when it comes to writing doco for clients it's back to word processors.<p>How can I be free from this enslavement to GUI tools and use markdown and &#60;insert your favorite text editor here, so as not to spark debate&#62; to author these docs?
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chrishorsley
Here's an experiment we are running here for our technical documents.

We have an Etherpad server (<http://etherpad.org/>) we heavily use, and we've
used it to write some of our technical docs in Markdown. We use other pads to
define HTML templates. Then, we have simple web app which merges a chosen HTML
template with the Markdown content, which lets the user preview the rendered
results before saving the final HTML output.

Advantages: you get all Etherpad's realtime collaboration goodness, automatic
version control and revision history, the HTML templates can be edited simply
(and restricted to editing by certain users), it's pretty quick to pick up.
Disadvantages: Etherpad is primarily text based so you're SOL if you need
diagrams etc, slight complexity of the parts (templates, content, web app) to
make it run.

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DamonOehlman
Sounds like a pretty nifty way of doing things, I might try running up an
etherpad server at some stage and going down a similar track.

I'm setting something up at a shell level using Jekyll
(<http://jekyllrb.com/>). Won't have the collaboration goodness, but I guess
it could be transitioned over to Etherpad at a later date.

