Tag: markdown

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ScholarlyMarkdown: A Markdown Flavor for Science and Math Scholarship

ScholarlyMarkdown is a syntax/standard/best-practice of scholarly and academic communication that is web-first, semantic XML-second, and LaTeX/Word a close third. Its main goal is to produce a semantically model of a scholarly article based on Markdown input, and translate it to a variety of formats that is suitable for both online scholarly communication, archiving, and publication.
ScholarlyMarkdown introduces some new syntax for scholarly and academic features. However, at the same time it aims to be composed of 100% valid Github-Flavored Markdown and PHP Markdown Extra syntax and almost 90% backwards compatibility with existing renderers of those syntaxes, while being 100% compatible with Pandoc-markdown. It contains no completely new syntax over the previous standards, and instead provides its power from conventions.
Furthermore, ScholarlyMarkdown borrows a unique templating system/language from Pandoc with variables and metadata that may be set using YAML blocks inside the document. This allows flexibility to configure the output formatting to your heart’s content without polluting the source text with presentation-specific code.

via ScholarlyMarkdown.

This looks like a worthwhile and promising project. It is important to note that the “scholarly” part is really a reference to including math and figures in Markdown and it requires a modified fork of Pandoc for rendering into HTML.

If you want to try Markdown with legal stuff see https://github.com/compleatang/legal-markdown and http://legalmarkdown.com/.

If you want to author legal scholarship, or any other scholarship,  in a plain text format and skip Word or WordPerfect altogether, I’d recommend using AsciiDoc, it was built for authoring complex documents like scholarly articles. For an example of legal scholarship in AsciiDoc see my article The Classical Roots of Binary Economics at http://elide.us/96.

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EpicEditor Is An Embedded Markdown Eidotr in JavaScript

EpicEditor is an embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor with split fullscreen editing, live previewing, automatic draft saving, offline support, and more. For developers, it offers a robust API, can be easily themed, and allows you to swap out the bundled Markdown parser with anything you throw at it.

via EpicEditor – An embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor.

A nice editor that you can embed in your project. Out of the box it supports Markdown1» but it is extensible so you can add or create parsers for other formats. It’s an open source project you can fork on Github.

Yes, Markdown is pretty neat but for academic and legal writing it lacks features like footnotes or endnotes. AsciiDoc is a better choice.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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Script Converts Basic Google Drive Documents To Markdown, Easing Portability

We’ve shown you the wonders of Markdown as great for your to-do lists and notes. If you love Markdown too but you’re stuck with a bunch of Google docs that aren’t in the format (but need to be), this Google Apps Script converts them instantly.

The script, available at GitHub by Renato Mangini, is easy to use, works like a charm, and you can save it in Google Drive so you can use it over and over, anytime you need to convert a document to Markdown.

via Lifehacker.com: This Script Converts Google Documents to Markdown for Easy Exporting.

Now this is intriguing. Markdown is a fine basic text markup language that is great for simple standalone documents1» . I’m certainly one of those folks who often feels like I’m stuck with using Google Docs and then find myself needing to use that info elsewhere. Good luck.

I’ve followed the instructions in the article to add this script to Google Drive and it seems to work well on things like meeting notes and outlines.  For more complex documents like a functional specification for a Drupal 7 website under development, the results are a bit more mixed. It certainly converts the document to markdown and it retains most of the general formatting, but the detail formatting is lost. it does do a great job at extracting images.

Overall I’d say this a useful tool for liberating basic documents from Google Drive. For more complex documents, I’m waiting for the version that converts to AsciiDoc.

 

For longer more complex works like a book or journal article I recommend AsciiDoc.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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What If You Could Store a Complete Document in a URL?

Hashify does not solve a problem, it poses a question: what becomes possible when one is able to store entire documents in URLs?

via Hashify.

Try contemplating this for a few minutes. A whole document. In a URL. Not a link to a document, the actual document. Encoded and stored in a URL. Thousands of characters reduced to a handful in a short URL.

Imagine a blog that is just a store of URLs. A messaging system that trades links instead of text. A commenting API that just delivers URLs.

In education there could be student portfolios that are literally a collection of links. Exam submissions that require only sending the teacher a URL.

The possibilities seem endless and exciting. You can give it a try at http://hashify.me/.