
Madoko – a fast markdown processor for writing professional documents - jamesadevine
https://www.madoko.net
======
messe
Why does everything have to run inside a web browser these days? I like my
text editors/word processors to be lean, lightweight and focused on one thing:
editing text. Everything Madoko offers here (aside from WYSIWYG—which is
overrated when you're trying to produce content) can be accomplished with
pandoc+your text editor of choice (I've been using classic nvi lately, seems
to work well for a distraction free environment and as a bonus is in the base
install of OpenBSD).

~~~
kjeetgill
I'm a basic bash and vim kinda cat too. Even then, I vastly prefer things in
the browser for these 'flavor-of-the-week' type apps than many of the
alternatives like:

    
    
      $ curl shady-url.com | bash, or
      $ tar xzf $(curl -O shady_url); make install, or
      $ npm install some-shady-package
      $ whatever other ruby/python/gem/egg/cmake/pathogen/etc.
      $ brew install cask github/shady-business
      $ docker pull ubunut+apt-get+myapp+postgres
    

Or hey, click this and forget about it in an hour. Ah. so much better.

~~~
b_b
While these web-app things may be nice for quickly trying out these programs,
for actual long-term use on my machine and workflow besides all of the other
programs, they don't stand up to the test unless they are truly revolutionary
and needed.

------
gioele
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165395)

The language Madoko has been written in is even more interesting: Koka.
[https://www.rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial](https://www.rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial)
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/koka/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/koka/)

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mathiasrw
Madoko is, to me, an absolute win.

Markdown for smooth text writing and a beautiful default visual expression
combined with ultra-precise control for CSS and pdf visuals makes it a very
powerful tool.

Examples of what can be made in Madoko:

\- [http://monetary-reform.info](http://monetary-reform.info)

\- [http://1984.surge.sh](http://1984.surge.sh)

\- [http://kortlink.dk/uumf](http://kortlink.dk/uumf) (PDF)

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siruncledrew
The presentation aspect with reveal.js is the most interesting feature to me.
I would prefer if there was just a package to do all this in VSCode or Atom,
since I could already write and preview markdown there for documents.

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Sean1708
This is why I'm always a bit wary of using Markdown for technical documents,
Markdown is just _too_ simple and you end up having to add on all these non-
standard extensions to make it halfway usable. Add on to that the fact that
Markdown isn't formally specified and has a bunch of ambiguities in what is
specified, and I just feel like it's more trouble than it's worth.

Maybe I'm being unfair, this project _does_ look very well done (the LaTeX
integration in particular looks much better than most Markdown flavour's
manage), I just don't really see what it improves on over something like
AsciiDoc.

------
kimi
So they basically extended MD to do many of the things AsciiDoc does?

Though I like the reveal.js editor that looks clean and simple enough.
Nowadays the old online editor seems PowerPoint (and that's not a compliment).

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ornel
Hey, this is great. With concurrent editing/sharing I would use this to work
on collective texts before translating to LaTeX for actual typesetting. Any
plans to offer that in the future?

~~~
mathiasrw
You dont need to convert to latex - you just include your latex mixed into the
markdown. Example:
[https://github.com/mathiasrw/cointext_whitepaper/blob/master...](https://github.com/mathiasrw/cointext_whitepaper/blob/master/whitepaper.mdk#L14-L28)

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donpark
[https://github.com/koka-lang/madoko](https://github.com/koka-lang/madoko)

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anotheryou
Sadly the example PDF is down. I wonder if it handles print stuff well. I
wrote my thesis in markdown/html and bringing it to print was a pain (try to
add non trivial page numbering via CSS...).

------
sriram_malhar
A video on Madoko from 2015:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/madoko-a-
scho...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/madoko-a-scholarly-
markdown/)

------
sytelus
Nice work but if I have to know LaTeX syntax, why am I not writing in LaTeX?

~~~
mathiasrw
For actual writing, markdown gives you a way better flow.

What gives you the most fluent experience?:

    
    
        The house looked _very_ good. 
    
        The house looked \textit{very} good.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Flow, the first. Correctness, the latter.

/This/ should be italics, _this_ should be underlined.

Does it matter how fast it is if it isn't right?

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chenzhekl
Recommend Marp if you would like to make presentations using markdown.

[https://yhatt.github.io/marp/](https://yhatt.github.io/marp/)

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lbriner
Some of the links on the page are broken. The presentation example is 404 and
the HTML example for latex gets redirected to the author's profile page.

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ausjke
how can I install this? npm install -g madoko gave me a command line but
nothing more, no installation instructions are found yet. would like to try it
locally.

~~~
Sean1708
These look like the installation instructions, but I've not tried them myself:
[http://madoko.org/reference.html#sec-installation-and-
usage](http://madoko.org/reference.html#sec-installation-and-usage)

