I totally missed the real-time collaboration bit -- of course that's what he's doing when he says he's doing homework and is evidently skyping. Shows my age, certainly! (In my day we convened at someone's home and invariably ended up with popcorn and a movie on the VCR! :-) As for Gdocs being free I guess any service which doesn't offer at least a free version is doomed with students and so probably doomed overall. I have a hard time imagining the GUI/WYSIWYG crowd seeing any value in using markdown as a behind-the-scenes format. Honestly what would it offer them which they don't already get from Gdocs? I think that however comparatively small its real audience is those who like plaintext and WYGIWYM and/or a lightweight alternative to LaTeX/HTML while being able to inline the heavier markup when needed. A friend of mine who has to submit work in LaTeX belongs to that category. My wife, who works for a government agency, OTOH has no incentive to leave her docx environment although she happily switches between Word and LibreOffice and in practice only ever uses the B I U buttons and font size menu for styling, because everyone she works with has the same workflow. Moreover their organization offers all the forms they need to fill in only as Word or PDF templates. The extra step of converting md to docx or the reverse is completely meaningless to her. She wrote a chapter in a book once before pandoc supported docx. When it was written she mailed it to me, I converted it to HTML with OpenOffice, ran my OO-HTML demoronizer script, converted to Markdown, proofed it edited it, converted to odt with pandoc, to docx with OO and mailed it back to her -- i.e. did pretty much what I do for all my clients with the difference that I didn't charge her anything! :-) Everyone is happy, including the publisher if any; language, grammar and spelling are correct and to boot headings are already formatted as such! Den 4 feb 2017 12:06 skrev "Kolen Cheung" : > I totally agreed with the geekiness. And the success of the markdown > services/apps I mentioned is exactly "taking away the geekiness" in > minipulating markdown documents. > > And I also see the penetration of Google Doc. I think the only reason > (besides being free) for its success is real time collaboration, That's why > I'm sad to see my university choose to offer ShareLaTeX & Overleaf for us > for free at least 3 years, but not Authorea, because real time > collaboration is really a big deals nowadays (and naturally has a huge > network effect to promotes the tools for the mass). I asked and they > response saying that they just choose it by the votes, and they only > consider offering 2 such services for free. (Their logic is too simplistic > though, Overleaf being so similar to ShareLaTeX while mostly inferior to it > should not be considered even if it is the 2nd most preferred platform > according to their internal survey. If they would have considered the > correlation between the votes, they would have pick the highest vote > "orthogonal" to ShareLaTeX. I guess that would be Authorea (not sure > though).) > > Also agree on the android/ios situation. I *might* try to see if I can > build one for android. But I think the iOS situation is completely hopeless > because of GPL incompatibility of the Appstore. I even at one point > searched example on how big open source projects successfully relicense > their code (e.g. VLC, Mozilla), even if the communities agree that's the > right direction, it is highly non-trvial because of the legal stuffs (e.g. > you need to have 95% of the contributors sign an agreement in all code > based...) The situation is just mission impossible for pandoc because of > the other GPL libraries used. (besides, I don't think consensus can be > obtained even within the pandoc communities only.) > > So it seems the only remaining way to tackle this problem is cloud > service, may be something like Authorea but with native apps similar to > typora to circumvent the Appstore problem. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "pandoc-discuss" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to pandoc-discuss+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org > To post to this group, send email to pandoc-discuss-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ > msgid/pandoc-discuss/98045a8b-71bc-4d91-b5c5-8c0a6f83aa1d% > 40googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pandoc-discuss" group. 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