Pandoc Markdown and ReST Compared (2013) (opens in new tab)

I like ReST as well. With Sphinx, it is great for producing documentation. A project that I work with has converted hundreds of pages of books of technical documentation over to Sphinx and a custom Sphinx extension.

> ReST feels more well thought-out, generally.

It's certainly set up for extensibility, although some areas are a pain (e.g. blank lines may be ignored entirely, change vertical spacing or change semantics, that can be annoying).

The toolchain is also fairly complex and very badly documented (Sphinx itself is better documented than docutils, but either way you end up wading through piles of code to understand what happens, why, and what's available in the applicative context of your extension)

Most the tools we have for WYSIWYG document creation lacks determinism and portability. For the latter, one could argue that there are open formats, but still, there should be a program that can interpret the format; whereas with plain text, such a need is void, as it is possible to view the document on any decent system. For the former, the argument might be that the modern word processors provide the facilities to deterministically lay out a document through the user interfaces they sport, but then because the formats they save are either are endemic to themselves or badly supported in other software* this feature is not of much use.

I can open a Markdown/ReST/Textile/... file with any text editor, including Notepad, Vim, Emacs etc., and also view it through more or less programs, or just cat them. I can pass them through head or tail; search them with common utilities and even edit them with some others. I am not bound to any programs in order to edit my program. If, on a computer I have to use, there is no Word, or Writer or Pages, I can still edit/read the document. I can read it online, via a browser. I can use programs that are decades old, and I also will be able to read the file decades later. When I send the file to someone else, I can be sure that they will be able to read it. Any usable operating system has a text editor bundled. This level of portability is just a dream for WYSIWYG editors. For these advantaged, I happily trade editing convenience off.

* Last summer, my cousins needed to use my computer for editing a docx document that was important for their undergraduate education. I was running Ubuntu OS at the time, so I told them to use the LibreOffice's word processor. The experience was bad; the document did not render properly, editing was problematic. This is the only case I can provide as an example to support my argument, as it has been multiple years since I used a word processor program.

The big gain is that is all just text and can be handled very well by the same version control system as the code is.

I can easily glance at what has happened to the docs just by looking at a diff, much like I do with all code my team produces already.

And being represented by all text doesn't mean this is what you give your customers. With a bit of work with pandoc etc. you can get a really slick and impressive end result.

Note that this article compares Pandoc Markdown to ReST; Pandoc adds a lot of features that vanilla Markdown lacks.

Of course, this is one of the big problems with Markdown; there are a bunch of different implementations, each of which adds its own extensions. Actually, if you take a look at the Pandoc homepage, you'll see that it implements 5 different Markdown flavors: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

"Incomplete" depends on the application. Markdown is intentionally a small and simple language, so it's fine for e.g. comments, but too limited for e.g. a full documentation.

(and as a result, it's tended up to spring numerous incompatible extensions e.g. TFA talks about Pandoc Markdown which adds tables, footnotes and a bunch of other stuff, not "Original" Markdown).

> somehow my AsciiDoc documents turn out looking better

Maybe it's just the default style of the Asciidoc HTML renderer, something like that?

" I have never understood the fetish behind Markdown"

For one, there are multiple (and good) implementations of Markdown in Javascript, so it's trivial to embed Markdown in web pages and do all the processing client-side -> faster and better user experience + much lower server load.

Pandoc a) only runs locally/server-side and b) requires a 200 MB Haskell install before it will work.

I Looked at the site for z.m.l (http://www.z-m-l.com/). It doesn't seem to do math, so it's a nonstarter.

BTW, Pandoc (which does do LaTeX math) really needs no improvement, only more widespread implementation (e.g., an online site, and/or a chrome extension coded in javascript.) I suppose its being written in Haskell has been an impediment.