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HTML and Markdown aren't right for me. What other text markup types are around?
Hello, power users! I am trying to make a personal wiki/zettelkasten/card index sorta thing to organise my fictional world as well as the rest of my daily life.
I chose Joplin, which is software I'm quite happy with! It works well, I like the split-screen with the preview on one side. I like the way it continuously backs up. I like that it's all offline and on my computer.
However, there's one issue. Markdown. I am not a big fan of markdown on Discord, but I thought maybe I could just cope with it, the benefits of organisation would outweigh the drawbacks.
However, I really just don't like markdown's reappropriation of different symbols for syntax (the asterix key for bold and italics as is seen here, for one, but Joplin also uses [tab] to make unformatted text which means I cannot make little indents for subsections or whatever)
So, what alternatives to Markdown exist?
So, I don't want HTML or anything else that does the separating of paragraphs and whatever with tags. Writing DOCTYPE html and <body> and <p> everywhere is just unappealing for me
HOWEVER, I like HTML's use of <b> <i> for bold and italics. I'd love a markup format that used this.
I guess what I am asking for is a plaintext (.txt) file with HTML formatting tags added on top of it, rather than a plaintext (.md) file with MarkDown added on top, or a HTML file.
What markup is closest to my requirements, if any?
1 answer
There is always a trade off between ease of writing and reading. HTML, Latex, rich text (docx/rtf) have excellent readability if prepared right, but writing in them is difficult. Plaintext is easy to write, but limited formatting can hamper readability. Which do you pick? It depends on how much you will write vs. read.
For personal notes, I often write a lot, but rarely read. The act of writing normally helps me memorize the information, so I only rarely have to go through the notes to find some forgotten detail from years ago. Markdown is good here - it happens to fit the natural way I type in plaintext anyway (eg. * for emphasis) and my editor (VS Codium) applies syntax highlighting to it, which is good enough for purposes of helping me visually navigate the document as I type. There's many good dedicated Markdown editors that show raw and rendered side by side, and I also know different ways of rendering it to look nice (eg. my own pandoc wrapper that converts to PDF with Latex or HTML with custom CSS). However I rarely feel the need to use those.
The point of Markdown is that it is 100% fine in a plaintext environment, or a plaintext with highlighting (like code editors). The option of rendering is great when you want to distribute it to a large audience of "readers" (or just 1 reader, you, who will keep coming back to the document) but it's not practical to have WYSIWYG editing workflow with it - even sites like this present the source and output in two separate areas. If you like this model, but you just don't like Markdown's specific syntax, there are other document markup langaguages: Docuwiki, reStructuredText, troff/groff, mediawiki. These are usually associated with tools for generating electronic software documentation. For example reST is used by Sphinx, *roff is used to create Unix man pages, mediawiki is probably most useful if you're planning to run a wiki.
An interesting one is org-mode, which is popular, considered powerful and "better" than Markdown. It's pretty tightly integrated into the Emacs ecosystem, and even though there are technically ways to use it without emacs, it seems to lose a lot of its utility when you do that (for example the VSC org-mode plugin is missing half the functions and comes with horrific default key mappings).
A popular product in this area is Obsidian. I don't recommend it because it's proprietary, and you don't want markdown. However, it inspired many alternative that try to do better, so you can try searching for those. There are too many to list here.
At the other end of the spectrum you have things like Latex and HTML. These are very heavy languages because they have much flexibility on controlling the exact typesetting of the text. For the same reason they are a huge chore to actually type in. The trick here is that it is possible to type your stuff in something is easy, and then use pandoc to convert to Latex/PDF or HTML. You can customize the template/rules used by pandoc - this is a pretty advanced thing, but if you're very particular, you can set it up once and have everything come out just the way you like it. Latex has various styles etc., HTML can be combined with CSS. But this is probably overkill for personal use. I use it in a very limited way: I have a script for my markdown food recipes that formats it as a 1-pager with customized fonts etc for printing, but I don't do that for the vast majority of my notes.
Also, Markdown specifically was never well-defined, so there's a lot of variants of it in circulation. Many programs support embedding inline HTML and other things (like Latex or Mermaid) if you have a situation where most of the document is simple, but there is one really complex thing in a few select places.
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