Peter and Serge,
I will be using Pandoc's markdown for sure. I can not wait *at this
moment* for Pillar to have the features I need for my writing (mainly
Zotero integration), but given the massive amount of work a proper
support of markdown will imply, I just use it, as now, by writing plain
text without any syntax highlighting support.
I wouldn't image that giving syntax highlighting support for markdown in
Pharo could be that hard, but I can write the thesis without it, using
just black text anywhere. Anyway having syntax support for another
languages is something that is being done for software analysis, so,
maybe at some point I can just try to learn how is being done with Petit
Parser o Smacc and see if I can help to create a more markdown friendly
environment in Pharo.
Thanks,
Offray
On 30/08/16 14:10, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Peter Uhnak <i.uh...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 07:50:10AM +0200, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:
Hi,
On 29/08/16 21:47, Yuriy Tymchuk wrote:
[...]
It pains me that we are editing Pillar in outside tools, and now we
should no longer have to do that. Of course, this is not the most
ideal tool support for Pillar but I think it is a reasonable start.
To make things sadder: when I need to write some short “richish" I’m
using markdown instead for pillar because in ATOM I can open the
rendered version of my document that will update while i type (and will
display images and so on). It could be nice to have the same
functionality in Pharo, but I’m really busy with improving other parts.
Additionally I’m not sure that it makes sense to reimplement rich text
editor in Pharo.
Uko
For me it would be really nice to have this kind of support for markdown.
That's the language I'm using for writing my PhD thesis in Pharo, and in
fact now that I'm in hackademia Summer School[1] is nice to find some other
PhD students that in fact are using markdown in their writing.
[1]
http://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/cdc/digital-cultures-research-lab/events/summer-school-2016.html
Having syntax highlighting and graphics preview for markdown would be a way
to introduce some new non-technical users and researchers to the Pharo
world, reproducible research, interactive documentation and modable tools,
but we need to start in a place they know, for example its markup language.
I don't really see the benefit of pushing Markdown into Pharo at _this moment_
(there is PetitParser for some flavor of md though).
If you want to use Markdown, then there is already fifteen billion of other
tools outside.
If you want deep integration with Pharo, then that takes a lot of effort, which
is being invested into Pillar, because Pillar is aiming to be a much more
powerful format --- maybe one day comparable to reStructuredText and to what
Python does with rst/sphinx.
Yes a lot of effort has already been put on Pillar and should continue
this effort.
If you want to use Markdown, you can use existing tools outside the image.
Don't forget that markdown, although an excellent markup for what it knows, is
also very simplistic.
So if you want to use Markdown for PhD, then you are actually not using
markdown, but most likely pandoc (or some richer syntax, such as scholarly
markdown)... and support for either is another order of magnitude more complex.
Bottom line(s):
* there's a continuous investment into improvement and deep
integration of Pillar
* not enough resources to go around and implement any notation
* Markdown is too simplistic for any advanced writing (and yes, I used
it to write papers and my thesis, but it also includes pandoc and many
make/bash/ruby scripts to hack around)
Markdown is not a good idea for thesis, but org-mode+org-babel is
quite good for papers. You might have a look to
Scimax that is based on these tools: http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/scimax
