<story><title>The future of education is plain text</title><url>https://simplystatistics.org/2017/06/13/the-future-of-education-is-plain-text/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I&amp;#x27;ve used every format from:&lt;p&gt;- Notepad&lt;p&gt;- Microsoft Word&lt;p&gt;- PDF&lt;p&gt;- Twiki&lt;p&gt;- Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML&lt;p&gt;- JIRA&lt;p&gt;- Raw HTML&lt;p&gt;- Markdown (several flavors)&lt;p&gt;With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been getting so tired of having to re-do stuff on different platforms that more of my docs are starting as Plaintext and then written in pseudocode markup for areas that I know will change on every platform (e.g. generating a table of contents, image tags, etc).&lt;p&gt;Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, &lt;i&gt;except&lt;/i&gt; when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.&lt;p&gt;The docs of mine that seem most resilient to platform shifts (other than plaintext) are the ones that are written in or compiled to longstanding formats like LaTeX or HTML.&lt;p&gt;So perhaps my takeaway is, write in something readable that compiles to something widely available. That will provide the least headache.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnHammersley</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re interested in adding LaTeX to that list, you might like to try Overleaf [1] -- it&amp;#x27;s an online collaborative LaTeX editor we built to try to lower the learning curve (I&amp;#x27;m one of the founders).&lt;p&gt;It includes a rich text mode for easier collaboration with non-LaTeX users [2], and you can also write in Markdown if you like :) [3].&lt;p&gt;Feedback always appreciated if you do give it a try, thanks.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.overleaf.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.overleaf.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.overleaf.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.overleaf.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;81&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.overleaf.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;501&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.overleaf.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;501&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The future of education is plain text</title><url>https://simplystatistics.org/2017/06/13/the-future-of-education-is-plain-text/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I&amp;#x27;ve used every format from:&lt;p&gt;- Notepad&lt;p&gt;- Microsoft Word&lt;p&gt;- PDF&lt;p&gt;- Twiki&lt;p&gt;- Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML&lt;p&gt;- JIRA&lt;p&gt;- Raw HTML&lt;p&gt;- Markdown (several flavors)&lt;p&gt;With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been getting so tired of having to re-do stuff on different platforms that more of my docs are starting as Plaintext and then written in pseudocode markup for areas that I know will change on every platform (e.g. generating a table of contents, image tags, etc).&lt;p&gt;Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, &lt;i&gt;except&lt;/i&gt; when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.&lt;p&gt;The docs of mine that seem most resilient to platform shifts (other than plaintext) are the ones that are written in or compiled to longstanding formats like LaTeX or HTML.&lt;p&gt;So perhaps my takeaway is, write in something readable that compiles to something widely available. That will provide the least headache.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdcarter</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found that Pandoc [1] is a wonderful converter if you want to write in a future-proof format (like markdown) but also generate nice PDFs.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pandoc.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pandoc.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>