
Ask HN: Why is Markdown so difficult to work with? - libeclipse
I find it&#x27;s inconsistent across services at best, and a complete pain at worst.<p>Github is one of the few places that render it beautifully. There are a few services that do this, but they never work with each other. They all decided to add their own niche things to it, completely breaking compatibility.<p>Also, has anyone ever tried to export markdown to a more portable format? If you&#x27;re extremely lucky, your PDF will have only a few rendering faults and your HTML, nah allow talking about the HTML.<p>I mean it&#x27;s a really elegant thing in itself, I just wish it&#x27;d play well outside of Github&#x27;s walled garden.<p>Has anyone else come across any of these problems? How did you solve them?
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enkiv2
Markdown was intended to be simple enough that everybody could roll their own
code to translate to their "real" markup language of choice. Everyone did, but
because markdown was a hack in the first place, the quality of implementations
is pretty inconsistent. (Which is fine, because rolling your own markdown ->
html translator is easy -- much easier than writing your own html -> anything
translator -- and well within the reach of even beginner programmers.)

I avoid markdown because I don't like markup in general (and because I think
styling of text is rarely useful), but if I need to work with it, I will whip
something up to do the translation. A couple lines of sed is sufficient for
handling whatever tiny subset of markdown is actually present.

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davelnewton
If you restrict yourself to the original ... "spec" then it generally works
fine. There are efforts afoot to standardize, but until everyone settles on
the one true markdown, there are a bunch of options.

The easiest solution is to move away from Markdown, of course, and pick
something that's been formalized. Which leads to the opposite issue, of
course.

Tools like Pandoc can eliminate some of those issues.

