Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joseph Reagle]

This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about other users.

I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, books, and blogs.

None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git.
One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc.
(Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this would round trip.)
Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into her branch when she's done and merge.
This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based on markdown regexes.
But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work.
In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text blocks.

How do other people manage this?

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Albert Krewinkel]

Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011-T1oY19WcHSwdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org> writes:

> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git.
>
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc.
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this would round trip.)
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into her branch when she's done and merge.
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based on markdown regexes.
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work.
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text blocks.
>
> How do other people manage this?

[Authorea] might be useful to you. It's a commercial tool which is using
pandoc in the background. Theresa and you would both have to use the web
interface, but each of you could select their preferred editing style.

[Authorea]: https://www.authorea.com/

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joseph Reagle]

Thank you, interesting! I should note that I want to be able to edit in my text editor of choice, off line if need be.

On 1/9/17 4:21 PM, Albert Krewinkel wrote:
>> How do other people manage this?
> 
> [Authorea] might be useful to you. It's a commercial tool which is using
> pandoc in the background. Theresa and you would both have to use the web
> interface, but each of you could select their preferred editing style.

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joseph Reagle]

On 1/9/17 5:09 PM, dmccunney wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 4:57 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011-T1oY19WcHSwdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> Thank you, interesting! I should note that I want to be able to edit in my text editor of choice, off line if need be.
> 
> If the issue is inter-operability with Google Docs, there are several
> third party solutions intended for working with Markdown.  A Google
> query of "google docs markdown" reveals stuff like
> http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/44047/how-can-google-docs-and-markdown-play-nice
> among others.

Hello Dennis. StackEdit is mentioned in that thread and it is very nice. I haven't tried it recently because I used to mainly be on Linux and there was no good Google Drive app, but I'm using a Mac more often now.  So I'd have to test if my local edits show up on the StackEdit page and vice-versa automatically. In any case, I don't think that means that file would also appear in Google Docs...

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Is it open source or closed source? This would make a big difference too. 
Because if it is closed source, then accessing a private repository will 
almost requires “Theresa” to sign up a premium account. But if it is open 
source, this problem is irrelevant.

Just to make it clear, I don’t have a lot of experience in collaborating in 
pandoc. This is a problem I need to solve on one of my project. Here’s what 
I have so far:

   1. 
   
   point them to some easy markdown guide, e.g. CommonMark’s markdown 
   guide. This will set them up to use the simplest markdown syntaxes in 10 
   minutes.
   2. 
   
   ask them to write plain LaTeX in the markdown (if your output is LaTeX, 
   and I assumes the colleagues at least know LaTeX).
   3. 
   
   setup a markdown “linter” (where pandoc is not designed for, but good 
   at). See a discussion in pandoc-discuss 
   <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pandoc-discuss/FRN6FxZCOjI/0BkkUIo9AAAJ>, 
   and an example in my testing repo 
   <https://github.com/ickc/travis-ci-pandoc-latex-config/blob/master/makefile#L200-L215> 
   (which requires more cleanup though, and is actually not the source since 
   the source is private).
   4. 
   
   Write a filter to convert the Raw LaTeX in (2) to native format:
   1. 
      
      Such a filter is something I want to write (when I have time). 
      Basically the idea is to allow a single source including fragments of 
      different languages (among those non-binary format pandoc support), and the 
      filter would call pandoc to convert each of the embedded format whenever 
      necessary for arbitrary output.
      2. 
      
      It also means (2) can be expanded: you can ask your collaborator to 
      write in any non-binary language supported by pandoc, e.g. rst/mediawiki, 
      etc.
      3. 
      
      Writing such a filter is not difficult, but I imagine there might be 
      many “issues” with it, because pandoc’s conversion is not perfect, people 
      might start to complain. (and the syntax is another area I need to give 
      much thought about)
      5. 
   
   Since you didn’t mention the use of filters, I don’t elaborate on it. 
   But it can be problematic when your pandoc document requires filters to 
   work too. In this case, setting up a makefile, Travis, write install 
   scripts for your colleagues are necessary. (Even without filters, makefile 
   and CI will be very helpful when collaborating.)
   
On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 10:48:54 AM UTC-8, Joseph wrote: This isn’t 
really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about other users. 

I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
books, and blogs. 

None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. One 
option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. (Note: I’m not creating a 
Doc from markdown because I don’t know if this would round trip.) Say I 
want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch “theresa,” copy the files 
into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into her 
branch when she’s done and merge. This will be weird for Theresa because 
there won’t be any formatting, although I do have a macro that formats 
heading and italics and such based on markdown regexes. But if we want to 
use Google Docs, that wouldn’t work. In any case, this is annoying for me 
because I have to manually port text blocks. 

How do other people manage this? 

​

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joseph Reagle]

On 1/9/17 5:36 PM, Kolen Cheung wrote:
> ask them to write plain LaTeX in the markdown (if your output is
> LaTeX, and I assumes the colleagues at least know LaTeX).

Hello Kolen, thanks for sharing your approach. And LaTeX would be even more of a stretch than Markdown for 95% of my colleagues. They mostly email Word docs back and forth.

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Some people do often convert between docx and markdown back and forth. 
pandoc’s support on docx seems quite solid, and it even has 
--track-changes=accept|reject|all to support MS Word’s “Track Changes” 
feature.

In Pandoc Extras · jgm/pandoc Wiki 
<https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-Extras>, there’s a tool called 
Writage that is designed for people using Word as a kind of “GUI for pandoc 
Markdown”.

Personally I would try to avoid MS Word, and avoid multiple back and forth 
conversion. May be you can test with one colleagues to send her the plain 
text markdown and see their reaction. Some sort of GUI would be helpful to 
them, and sadly is one weakness of pandoc. Web services like the one 
suggested by Albert would help. Or you can just use GitHub’s web interface 
as markdown editor. I think there’s also one web app designed as a markdown 
editor (I think you might be able to search and find it in pandoc-discuss).

On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 5:51:26 PM UTC-8, Joseph wrote:

On 1/9/17 5:36 PM, Kolen Cheung wrote: 
> > ask them to write plain LaTeX in the markdown (if your output is 
> > LaTeX, and I assumes the colleagues at least know LaTeX). 
>
> Hello Kolen, thanks for sharing your approach. And LaTeX would be even 
> more of a stretch than Markdown for 95% of my colleagues. They mostly email 
> Word docs back and forth. 
>
​

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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See this thread for some markdown 
editor: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pandoc-discuss/WTq_L2RSHDk/qTQlI-3QUJcJ

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joseph Reagle]

On 1/9/17 9:05 PM, Kolen Cheung wrote:
> Some people do often convert between docx and markdown back and
> forth. pandoc’s support on docx seems quite solid, and it even has
> |--track-changes=accept|reject|all| to support MS Word’s “Track
> Changes” feature.

I hadn't see this option, I'll investigate.

> In Pandoc Extras · jgm/pandoc Wiki
> <https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-Extras>, there’s a tool
> called Writage that is designed for people using Word as a kind of
> “GUI for pandoc Markdown”.

Thanks, will check this out too!

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Luis Fernado Silva Castro de Araújo]

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My 2c Joseph,

I work in a pretty mainstream lab in medical sciences and I am required to 
work with docx. No third part web tools allowed. However, I still consider 
working with pandoc more comfortable as it does not require endless style 
editing resulting from small inconsistencies between mac and windows 
microsoft word. So what I do is work in pandoc and export into docs for 
collaboration. When co-authors responds, I then manually incorporate the 
changes to my original. Paper submission is also simplified, because once 
the paper is ready I convert it into docx and upload to the journal. No 
unaligned paragraphs, no odd behaving tables, rulers that suddenly appear, 
etc. I know these things improved over the years, but they are still there 
in Word 2013.

Now the grim part. You are doomed if your work has complex tables (as is 
often my case). So I can only incorporate pandoc in about 50% of my actual 
work at the moment.

Pandoc integration to docx is really strong at the moment, totally reliable 
in all my uses so far. I just wish pandoc had the same cell span support 
from Multimarkdown.

Best

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John MacFarlane]

+++ Luis Fernado Silva Castro de Araújo [Jan 09 17 19:46 ]:
>   Pandoc integration to docx is really strong at the moment, totally
>   reliable in all my uses so far. I just wish pandoc had the same cell
>   span support from Multimarkdown.

Yes, this should be a high priority, but of course it's
complex.

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/1024


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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Pablo Rodríguez]

On 01/09/2017 07:48 PM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about
> other users.
> 
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides,
> articles, books, and blogs.
> 
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git.
> 
> How do other people manage this?

Sorry, but which is the workflow in that cases?

I mean, I think there might be an option for this, but only to
incorporate feedback from other users.

It might be an easier way to use pandoc, but git would be too much for
any pandoc newcomer.


Pablo
-- 
http://www.ousia.tk

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John Gabriele]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017, at 01:48 PM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about
> other users.
> 
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles,
> books, and blogs.
> 
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git.
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc.
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this
> would round trip.)
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the
> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into
> her branch when she's done and merge.
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting,
> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such
> based on markdown regexes.
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work.
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text
> blocks.
> 
> How do other people manage this?

John M, as far as round-tripping WYSIWYG formats, is Pandoc most adept
at working with odt (as compared to .doc or .docx)?

If so, then if your users (Joseph) are flexible maybe they can edit them
in LibreOffice, save in odt, and you can convert to pandoc-markdown on
your end for editing (and then back again to odt for your users).

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John MacFarlane]

>John M, as far as round-tripping WYSIWYG formats, is Pandoc most adept
>at working with odt (as compared to .doc or .docx)?

No, docx support is currently better than odt.

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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I mentioned using pandoc to lint, and since you mentioned the collaboration 
part happens with docx, I am thinking about a linting method that I haven’t 
tried so far:
<#>Lint: Markdown to Markdown 

What I’ve tried: pandoc -f markdown -t markdown ... as a linter 
(internally: markdown to AST to markdown). In my use, this works quite 
well. Technically, you’ll want the “linted” version to be “stable” (meaning 
that a 2nd lint would change it at all). i.e. idempotent. In my test, it 
seems that repeating the above steps twice will give you a stable, linted 
document.

[Just to emphasize it again: @jgm said that pandoc is not designed as a 
linter (albeit it is very good at it). i.e. any imperfectness in linting is 
not a bug per se.]
<#>(Untested) Lint: Markdown to Word to Markdown 

Since in the end you want to “merge” the docx back to your markdown source, 
you’d want to pandoc -f docx -t markdown ... in the end. However, even if 
your colleagues haven’t changed anything, this step will still gives you a 
lot of diff.

So the way to lint the markdown before sharing first is kind of like pandoc 
-f markdown -t docx ... | pandoc -f docx -t markdown ... applied on your 
markdown. This is kind of like the one above, but more conversions 
happened, because internally: markdown to AST to docx to AST to markdown. 
But I suspect running this command a no. of times (say, 2) will give you a 
stable, linted document. (Meaning that if the docx shared is unmodified, 
the markdown you get back from the docx to markdown conversion should not 
be changed too.)

Then let say you manage your markdown in git, you can have commits that is 
editing, linting, and “merging” (from the docx you share). That would make 
the history quite clear, and minimize the impact that your colleagues are 
not really editing the source (the whole workflow can be semi-automatic, 
e.g. by keeping the commands in a makefile).
​

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Matthias Hüning]

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Hi Joseph,

I have been using Dropbox Paper for this. And I like it! 
It's all markdown (but you don't have to know markdown), 
beautiful ui, perfect for collaboration. Great.
https://paper.dropbox.com/
Still beta, but no problems so far.

- Matthias



Am Montag, 9. Januar 2017 19:48:54 UTC+1 schrieb Joseph:
>
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
> other users. 
>
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
> books, and blogs. 
>
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
> would round trip.) 
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
> her branch when she's done and merge. 
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
> on markdown regexes. 
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text 
> blocks. 
>
> How do other people manage this? 
>

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joseph Reagle]

Hello Matthias, 

On 1/12/17 7:18 AM, Matthias Hüning wrote:
> I have been using Dropbox Paper for this. And I like it!
> It's all markdown (but you don't have to know markdown),
> beautiful ui, perfect for collaboration. Great.
> https://paper.dropbox.com/
> Still beta, but no problems so far.

Ah, so HackPad finally makes its appearance after being purchased by DropBox. (And HackPad was a fork of EtherPad.) It does look nice, do you get a corresponding markdown text file in your file system so you can edit with your own text editor?

Coincidentally, a few days ago I was looking into HackPad-like options and discovered <https://stackedit.io/> . It is *very* impressive---but still doesn't give me that easy-collaborator-annotations and local-filesystem-editor round-trip I'm looking for.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Matthias Hüning]

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Am Donnerstag, 12. Januar 2017 14:11:11 UTC+1 schrieb Joseph:
>
>
> Ah, so HackPad finally makes its appearance after being purchased by 
> DropBox. (And HackPad was a fork of EtherPad.) It does look nice, do you 
> get a corresponding markdown text file in your file system so you can edit 
> with your own text editor? 
>

No, not yet, but if I remember correctly they are planning to further 
integrate Dropbox Paper with the ordinary Dropbox soon.
For the time being, you can download everything in different formats 
(Markdown, docx).
 

> Coincidentally, a few days ago I was looking into HackPad-like options and 
> discovered <https://stackedit.io/> . It is *very* impressive---but still 
> doesn't give me that easy-collaborator-annotations and 
> local-filesystem-editor round-trip I'm looking for. 
>

Yes, I also played around with Stackedit, it really is impressive.
But for collaboration, comments, annotations etc. the Dropbox-solution is 
superior, I think. At least, that has been my impression some weeks ago. 
But things are changing fast...

- Matthias




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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[josh-5FLFBhs1gLFWk0Htik3J/w]

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Hi Joseph,

You may consider writing the document on Authorea (www.authorea.com) we 
utilize Pandoc in the backend but have a much easier wysiwyg interface for 
non-technical writers, which allows for easy collaboration.  You can see a 
demo of our new editor 
here: https://www.authorea.com/users/65274/articles/149190/_show_react

Best!
Josh

On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 1:48:54 PM UTC-5, Joseph wrote:
>
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
> other users. 
>
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
> books, and blogs. 
>
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
> would round trip.) 
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
> her branch when she's done and merge. 
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
> on markdown regexes. 
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text 
> blocks. 
>
> How do other people manage this? 
>

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Hi, Josh,

Today I received an email from the school (UCB), sadly they offers us free 
access to ShareLaTeX and Overleaf but Authorea is not in the list. I 
already emailed them to suggest them adding Authorea too. May be you can 
approach them to explain why Authorea is competitive and unique against 
what they offer?

On Thursday, January 12, 2017 at 7:04:07 AM UTC-8, jo...-5FLFBhs1gLFWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org wrote:
>
> Hi Joseph,
>
> You may consider writing the document on Authorea (www.authorea.com) we 
> utilize Pandoc in the backend but have a much easier wysiwyg interface for 
> non-technical writers, which allows for easy collaboration.  You can see a 
> demo of our new editor here: 
> https://www.authorea.com/users/65274/articles/149190/_show_react
>
> Best!
> Josh
>
> On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 1:48:54 PM UTC-5, Joseph wrote:
>>
>> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
>> other users. 
>>
>> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
>> books, and blogs. 
>>
>> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
>> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
>> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
>> would round trip.) 
>> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
>> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
>> her branch when she's done and merge. 
>> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
>> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
>> on markdown regexes. 
>> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
>> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text 
>> blocks. 
>>
>> How do other people manage this? 
>>
>

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Rick Dooling]

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I never pass up the chance to introduce students and collaborators to 
Markdown. There are dozens of editors. Most people seem to figure it out 
within a day or two, and we're off. If Git or Github or diff is involved I 
tend to handle all of that, but I think you could just pass Markdown files 
back and forth. I think even committed Word users don't mind playing with a 
text editor. 

RD

On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 12:48:54 PM UTC-6, Joseph wrote:
>
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
> other users. 
>
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
> books, and blogs. 
>
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
> would round trip.) 
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
> her branch when she's done and merge. 
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
> on markdown regexes. 
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text 
> blocks. 
>
> How do other people manage this? 
>

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[BP Jonsson]

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Oh yes, many of them suffer from if not Word addiction then WYSIWYG
addiction, or command line phobia, or both. Some who pick up the idea with
Markdown right away still prefer WYSIWYG or can't be bothered with the
extra conversion step or the command line generally.

ons 1 feb. 2017 kl. 04:47 skrev Rick Dooling <rpdooling-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>:

> I never pass up the chance to introduce students and collaborators to
> Markdown. There are dozens of editors. Most people seem to figure it out
> within a day or two, and we're off. If Git or Github or diff is involved I
> tend to handle all of that, but I think you could just pass Markdown files
> back and forth. I think even committed Word users don't mind playing with a
> text editor.
>
> RD
>
>
> On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 12:48:54 PM UTC-6, Joseph wrote:
>
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about
> other users.
>
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles,
> books, and blogs.
>
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git.
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc.
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this
> would round trip.)
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the
> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into
> her branch when she's done and merge.
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting,
> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based
> on markdown regexes.
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work.
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text
> blocks.
>
> How do other people manage this?
>
> --
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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Or WYSIWYM is the case of markdown.

It's a natural learning curve for young people though. Although when I was 
a child there were only DOS, as I grow up with the Windows platform, I 
almost never touch the cmd (except when partitioning HDD or ipconfig, 
etc.). It's good that I migrated to the Mac platform later, and on Mac 
Terminal is a bit more encouraged. (And Mac's Terminal looks much nicer to 
look at. Windows' cmd is pixelated font looking so scary.)

Given the latest generation born with iOS/Android and may not touch a 
computer much later (at least in US), this problem will only be more 
severe. It's sad to see Apple's Mac was once the best UNIX experience, and 
they didn't put a Terminal in their UNIX OS, iOS.

The first time I heard people submit their paper by programming it in 
LaTeX, I really thought they were crazy and old school. I would say people 
younger than me in general would think it is impossible to imagine why some 
people like to work like we do (using pandoc for example). There was a TV 
program showing kids playing with old computers and they are so surprised 
to see that you really need to push the power button when the computer told 
you to do so.

So, to me, I often worry about the future of tools like pandoc. One of the 
solution is "if you can't beat them, join them". i.e. a GUI around pandoc 
would hide away the "old-school"ness and get young people on board. I guess 
that's why Authorea/ShareLaTeX/etc. are becoming more popular.

On Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 3:07:19 AM UTC-8, BP Jonsson wrote:
>
> Oh yes, many of them suffer from if not Word addiction then WYSIWYG 
> addiction, or command line phobia, or both. Some who pick up the idea with 
> Markdown right away still prefer WYSIWYG or can't be bothered with the 
> extra conversion step or the command line generally.
>
> ons 1 feb. 2017 kl. 04:47 skrev Rick Dooling <rpdo...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org 
> <javascript:>>:
>
>> I never pass up the chance to introduce students and collaborators to 
>> Markdown. There are dozens of editors. Most people seem to figure it out 
>> within a day or two, and we're off. If Git or Github or diff is involved I 
>> tend to handle all of that, but I think you could just pass Markdown files 
>> back and forth. I think even committed Word users don't mind playing with a 
>> text editor. 
>>
>> RD
>>
>>
>> On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 12:48:54 PM UTC-6, Joseph wrote:
>>>
>>> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
>>> other users. 
>>>
>>> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, 
>>> articles, books, and blogs. 
>>>
>>> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
>>> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
>>> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
>>> would round trip.) 
>>> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
>>> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
>>> her branch when she's done and merge. 
>>> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
>>> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
>>> on markdown regexes. 
>>> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
>>> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port 
>>> text blocks. 
>>>
>>> How do other people manage this? 
>>>
>> -- 
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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John Muccigrosso]

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On Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 5:22:32 PM UTC-5, Kolen Cheung wrote:
>
> The first time I heard people submit their paper by programming it in 
> LaTeX, I really thought they were crazy and old school. I would say people 
> younger than me in general would think it is impossible to imagine why some 
> people like to work like we do (using pandoc for example).
>

In general I wouldn't confuse markdown with latex. Markdown is much easier 
to explain to people unfamiliar with it and is much more readable as-is.
 

> So, to me, I often worry about the future of tools like pandoc. One of the 
> solution is "if you can't beat them, join them". i.e. a GUI around pandoc 
> would hide away the "old-school"ness and get young people on board. I guess 
> that's why Authorea/ShareLaTeX/etc. are becoming more popular.
>

It's easy enough on a Mac to script something up. (I've got something 
<https://github.com/Jmuccigr/AppleScripts/tree/master/pandoc> on my github 
page, for example.) 

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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On Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 5:59:43 PM UTC-8, John Muccigrosso wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 5:22:32 PM UTC-5, Kolen Cheung wrote:
>>
>> The first time I heard people submit their paper by programming it in 
>> LaTeX, I really thought they were crazy and old school. I would say people 
>> younger than me in general would think it is impossible to imagine why some 
>> people like to work like we do (using pandoc for example).
>>
>
> In general I wouldn't confuse markdown with latex. Markdown is much easier 
> to explain to people unfamiliar with it and is much more readable as-is.
>

I would say it is not much about the language but about the workflow. The 
success of MultiMarkdown Composer, Byword, etc. are successful example of 
this. They "hide away" the plain text and source code nature of markdown 
and provide a GUI to bridge their experience. The current generation really 
care about this.
 

>  
>
>> So, to me, I often worry about the future of tools like pandoc. One of 
>> the solution is "if you can't beat them, join them". i.e. a GUI around 
>> pandoc would hide away the "old-school"ness and get young people on board. 
>> I guess that's why Authorea/ShareLaTeX/etc. are becoming more popular.
>>
>
> It's easy enough on a Mac to script something up. (I've got something 
> <https://github.com/Jmuccigr/AppleScripts/tree/master/pandoc> on my 
> github page, for example.) 
>

I agree. I am saying those young people won't even bother to start using it 
(not to mention learn how to script because of it).

There's some over-generalization here. But I hope the point is clear, the 
majority of the current younger generation really don't have the right kind 
of attitude/world view/workflow/skills to use something like pandoc.

And just to make it clear: I don't think the current pandoc "way" has any 
problem. I am just saying this is a huge gap for young people to pick up. 
The nice thing (or bad thing depending on the perspective) about GUI is the 
end users do not need to learn anything to get start. Sadly, most people 
don't want to learn and yet want to be productive right away. So as an 
educator my perspective is at least one can provide a less steep learning 
curve to inspire people to learn. Once you "lure them in", they will want 
more.

A sidenote: I quite admire the UK education teaching all the young kids 
programming. e.g. the Raspberry Pi foundation kind of project. I wish every 
kid on the planet is taught this way such that the terminal and scripting 
are their "default" on using computers, rather than touch UI, etc.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Pablo Rodríguez]

On 02/02/2017 05:28 AM, Kolen Cheung wrote:
> [...]
> There's some over-generalization here. But I hope the point is clear,
> the majority of the current younger generation really don't have the
> right kind of attitude/world view/workflow/skills to use something like
> pandoc.

[Excuse me, but I couldn’t refrain from commenting ;-).]

I don’t educate younger people, but their lack of interest might show
something more basic: the lack of knowledge.

I’m going to simplify it: GUIs make it easier to start using programs,
because it is like playing with toys. Proper computer usage requires
ability to communicate with them, instead.

A good example for communication would be to place one of the young
persons in Sweden. Imagine that the person doesn’t speak Swedish and
that none in Sweden speaks any other language than Swedish. (Otherwise,
I won’t be able to make my point :-).)

The young person goes to the cafeteria. She may point to the cake she
wants and to the coffe can. She gets started with cake and a cup of
coffe. Asking for an Earl Grey tea might be harder. But how about: “I
starve for that marvelous cake you had last Saturday”?

To make the coincidence more similar, she can even tap twice with her
nail on the glass where the cakes are shown to the public. In real
life, Swedes are fluent in English. But you can only communicate with
computers in only one way.

> And just to make it clear: I don't think the current pandoc "way" has
> any problem. I am just saying this is a huge gap for young people to
> pick up. The nice thing (or bad thing depending on the perspective)
> about GUI is the end users do not need to learn anything to get start.

Maybe some basic explanations about what computers work and how they
work might help here. Teaching that has almost nothing to do with
teaching how to use particular programs (either GUI-based or not).

Of course, the aim of learning how to use computers isn’t to avoid
playing with them. If computers are universal machines and digital
assistants, it is about to know how to order and command them. I mean,
learning is about making more and making it better. And not about
achieving the same things using text-based tools.

Not even simple operations can be done using a pointer (or they are
much harder). Just an anecdote. I had an mp3 that played all albums in
no order. The playing order in any album was always wrong. I
accidentally discovered that they were ordered by writing time (first
written, first played). Next time, I copied songs from album one after
another in playing order. Until I realized that a loop was the way to
do it.

This is clear to me, either the computer makes the work for the user,
or the user ends working for the computer.

What GUI lovers may be failing to understand is that computers are way
more powerful tools that the fancy toys they appear to them. And we are
failing to explain this.

I cannot program (I understand what variables and functions are, but
classes are mistery to me). I am only an average computer user.

We might discuss whether programming is part of the basic education
every person should have. But operating computers (and not just playing
with them) should be a required knowledge for anyone.

> Sadly, most people don't want to learn and yet want to be productive
> right away. So as an educator my perspective is at least one can provide
> a less steep learning curve to inspire people to learn. Once you "lure
> them in", they will want more.

I think there are different issues involved here.

I might agree that the learning curve for any TeX macro language (or
even for TeX itself) is steep. Markdown isn’t hard to learn. What we
might be missing is to show the context in which Markdown makes sense.

Markdown might be described by the GUI lovers as counterintuitive. If
computers would be all shapes and colors to be clicked on, I agree with
the description. But computers aren’t that kind of thing.

The issue here could be that we might be using Markdown (and pandoc) as
a simplification layer to LaTeX. If LaTeX is too complex, maybe it
isn’t the right tool. It is also the wrong tool, because it doesn’t
accept markup. It only accepts text with (La)TeX commands.

Markdown is a poor replacement for LaTeX. But considering many of the
issues at GitHub and messages to this list, I won’t say Markdown is not
only an easier way of using LaTeX. I think this is part of the problem.

Simplicity and consistency help learning. To name some:

    1. *Italics*, **bold**, _italics again_ and __bold again__ are easy
    ways to make mistakes for newbies. Why not underscore for italics
    and asterisk for bold? What we have now isn’t exactly simply.

    2. The magic rule for building block elements is no blank line
    between lines. Are titles block elements? Yes, but only one line
    allowed. Exceptions to rules (mainly [or only] based on historical
    reasons) aren’t especially consistent (from a learning perspective,
    too).

    3. Side-marking is a pain. Requiring special editors is only making
    things hard (and not always better). With a real-world example:
    what happens when you have to blockquote a statue that contains
    three nested lists with legal text? My experience: I had to write
    the HTML code and translate it to Markdown.

    4. Basic metadata names are full words: title, subtitle, author,
    license, date... except lang. Why? Sure not to help non-English
    speakers. I asked for the full keyword citing the difficulty for
    people not fluent in English. The reply was backwards
    compatibility. I reasoned that having both language and lang,
    deprecating the last (and discarding it after some time) would be a
    good compromise solution. Proposal rejected. Well, I’m still trying
    to get what consistency should mean here, since it is the only
    abbreviated word. And its usage is essential when your document is
    not written in English.

    5. You might place the bibliography in the document. But not the
    footnotes or the table of contents. It is much more common to have
    table of contents or footnotes than a bibliography.

Maybe the design of pandoc is done with programmers in mind. If we need
filters or special templates for basic usage, the problem may be the
design itself. Yes, we need special templates to place a TOC after the
text or before the colophon. And although pandoc deploys LaTeX from its
inception, there is no way to have multilingual documents (using only
pandoc). A special syntax for languages (such as
`[Sprachmischung]{:de}`, which would be wrong hyphenated with English
rules) is still to be implemented.

I think that a GUI is a way of distracting from the markup itself. If
light weight markup is valuable, hiding it isn’t the best way to learn
it. Unless one becomes familiar with it, markup will be only considered
a complex way of writing texts on the computer.

A GUI would ease also the perception that everything is fine as it is.
Because it would be another word processor for the user. And how can you
realize the benefit of something when you never experienced it?

Learning requires the acknowledgement of one’s own ignorance and the
investment of both time and effort in the task. Learning isn’t painful,
but it won’t happen without any effort from the person aiming to learn.

What we are failing to communicate is why it is useful and interesting
to learn pandoc and pure-text tools in general. Or we don’t explain why
a computer is something inherently different from a desktop and a
pointer clicking on icons.

BTW, it seems that using LaTeX decreases productivity:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069.
I would agree with that view (I haven’t read the article myself),
considering the explanation that follows. With LaTeX you may play the
typesetter, but using it doesn’t turn yourself into one.

In Markdown text and layout are separated, in a LaTeX source file they
cannot be. What might be considered as LaTeX tagging are actualy
typesetting commands. This is why Markdown itself is much easier to
learn and more useful than LaTeX. But if Markdown is only an easier
layer for LaTeX, the problem may be saying Markdown, while meaning
LaTeX.

Just in case it helps,

Pablo
-- 
http://www.ousia.tk

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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It’s interesting to hear opinion and/or philosophy from another 
perspective. And I think in general I agree with you.

Just to make sure I didn’t make clear of what I want to say: (replaces 
students by “most/many students” below to avoid over-generalization)

   1. 
   
   the GUI problem of pandoc, if being dealt with in the future, probably 
   should not be under jgm/pandoc, nor have the name of pandoc (but something 
   close). (pandoc as a language vs. pandoc as the library vs. pandoc as a cli 
   vs. pandoc as a gui (might actually work though?)) Probably won’t be by jgm 
   himself either. So I’m not talking about pandoc-gui as the should-be future 
   direction of jgm/pandoc.
   2. 
   
   there’s already one interesting tool — https://typora.io — that’s almost 
   pandoc-gui. My main problem with this is, its markdown syntax is not 
   strictly pandoc markdown, but a markdown defines by the author of the app, 
   and based on the same pandoc AST, such that any input/output formats of 
   pandoc can be supported. Some of other issues I concern are not 
   open-source, and not multi-platform. But these are minor and if someone 
   write a great, proprietary GUI for pandoc, I think if he asks for money, he 
   deserves it. (regarding licensing, GUI like this do not include pandoc, so 
   the markdown to AST conversion, as well as AST to HTML/etc. conversion are 
   proprietary code, and pandoc’s executables are optional, user-installed 
   add-on.)
   3. 
   
   more on education, I agree students should learn. But the current 
   education system do not provide opportunities to learn something like this. 
   It’s not pandoc specific but in general: ever seeing a University course 
   teaching students to use MS Word? I might be wrong, but they just assumes 
   you do. (when I was in Hong Kong, A-level (high school exam) education, the 
   curriculum includes those. But I didn’t see a University class on this.) A 
   better example is LaTeX, there are no University class (I’m pretty sure at 
   least for the institutes I’ve been to) teaching LaTeX, yet they expect you 
   (at least graduate students) to pick it up on your own. Things like this 
   are deemed unimportant as far as University course goes, but in a sense is 
   the most important skills one need (since it is portable to any given 
   tasks/courses/jobs/etc.).
   1. 
      
      A corollary to this point is, students have no time to learn these 
      tools. Especially in US, many of my students are working part-time to 
      support themselves. Assignments are a ton many (US education system 
      emphasize on continuous assessment. A consequence of this is students often 
      have not much disciplines… Because they often do what they are told to but 
      not planning it on their own. It’s a snowball effect.)
      2. 
      
      I guess one thing makes markdown so popular is, the learning curve is 
      very gentle, and it almost takes no time to pick the syntax up. I don’t 
      know a lot about the histories of markdown, but I think part of the 
      contribution of the widespread of markdown is actually iPad — the first 
      time a full-(screen-)size “computer” cannot uses Word. A lot of GUI has 
      been built (e.g. Byword) and distribute in the Appstore that uses the 
      markdown syntax. This is the “laymenization” of markdown (I just make it 
      up, not a historian/social scientist/etc.), previously designed to ease the 
      job of “coders” of HTML.
      3. 
      
      So the problem (that prevent “laymenization”) about pandoc is there’s 
      no good GUI for people to gets their hands on it the first time. At least 
      for me, pandoc is not the first markdown dialect I learnt, and my guess is 
      the majority of pandoc users are similar this way. (Atom doesn’t count, 
      although I plan to write a guide of using pandoc “GUI” using Atom, because 
      Atom is for hackers, and setting up Atom to use pandoc is non-trivial at 
      least for Mac users because of PATH)
      
Ya, so to reiterate what I said, I am not saying the pandoc “core” has any 
problem. I am talking more about a possible 3rd party effort to build a 
pandoc GUI to attract the “next billion”. I personally love the tool pandoc 
very much, and I wish to see everyone on the planet using it, not just an 
“elite class of people”. It also ensures the longevity of pandoc (although 
the heavy integration in Rmarkdown and iPython seems to provide a lot of 
stability to pandoc’s future). Because of this, this post might fit in the 
“ecosystem” thread better. (we’re here because of a digression on how 
difficult to lure people in using pandoc and collaborate with us.)

P.S. I think there’s a big philosophical difference among the pandoc users 
on why they love pandoc. To some, markdown is a plaintext format, readable 
in source, and pandoc is an extension to it. To me, the niceness of the 
pandoc syntax is more like Python syntax: although it reads nice (i.e. very 
easy to maintain), I’m sure I’m going to “run” it rather than read it. i.e. 
markdown to me is always just a source code. The real attractiveness of 
pandoc to me is 1 source, multiple outputs (covering most formats I need + 
I will need). This point cannot be emphasized enough: it gives a stability 
to my documents no matter what I will do with it in the future, which 
cannot be said even for MS Word. I guess the reason of the success of 
pandoc is its richness — it gives us many reasons to love it, and it only 
takes one for us to fall in love with it.
​

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John MacFarlane]

There is this gui wrapper, which I have never tried:
http://panconvert.sourceforge.net

A couple projects I have in mind that might make GUI
wrappers easier:

- a module wrapping the functionality now provided by
  pandoc.hs, the command line tool.  This would make
  it easier to write a GUI wrapper in Haskell.

- pandoc-servant, a server that exposes all of pandoc's
  functionality -- which could again be used to write
  a GUI or web interface.

Haven't gotten around to either, but maybe for 2.0.

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Joost Kremers]

On Fri, Feb 03 2017, John MacFarlane wrote:
> A couple projects I have in mind that might make GUI
> wrappers easier:
[...]
> - pandoc-servant, a server that exposes all of pandoc's
>   functionality -- which could again be used to write
>   a GUI or web interface.

That might also make Pandoc intergration in editors easier, right? 
I'm thinking of my Emacs mode for Pandoc in particular. Right now, 
there's quite a bit of code to convert the internal representation 
of settings to a command line that the pandoc binary can 
understand. Depending on how the server works, that could perhaps 
be streamlined a lot.


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John Muccigrosso]

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On Thursday, February 2, 2017 at 7:28:21 PM UTC-5, Kolen Cheung wrote:
>
>
>    1. 
>    
>    more on education, I agree students should learn. But the current 
>    education system do not provide opportunities to learn something like this. 
>    It’s not pandoc specific but in general: ever seeing a University course 
>    teaching students to use MS Word? I might be wrong, but they just assumes 
>    you do. (when I was in Hong Kong, A-level (high school exam) education, the 
>    curriculum includes those. But I didn’t see a University class on this.) A 
>    better example is LaTeX, there are no University class (I’m pretty sure at 
>    least for the institutes I’ve been to) teaching LaTeX, yet they expect you 
>    (at least graduate students) to pick it up on your own. Things like this 
>    are deemed unimportant as far as University course goes, but in a sense is 
>    the most important skills one need (since it is portable to any given 
>    tasks/courses/jobs/etc.).
>    2. 
>       1. 
>       
>       A corollary to this point is, students have no time to learn these 
>       tools. Especially in US, many of my students are working part-time to 
>       support themselves. Assignments are a ton many (US education system 
>       emphasize on continuous assessment. A consequence of this is students often 
>       have not much disciplines… Because they often do what they are told to but 
>       not planning it on their own. It’s a snowball effect.)
>       
> This is an interesting thread, but let's not just start making things up.

For example, I am *right now* teaching a college course in Roman history in 
which I teach markdown and require my students to use it. And there are 
plenty of workshop opportunities for students (and faculty and staff) to 
learn about various other tools, like citation managers and, yes, word 
processors.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Workshop is not the same as a course. If something cannot earn them credits, most/some of them will not spend time to learn it (as I said, they are already very busy with parttime jobs). (I am planning to offer a ~1 hour workshop on using pandoc too, but  the venue is at the library, and has a capacity of about half a hundred seats. The total no of students in our university is about half 10k or more.

And it is bravo for you to require the students in your class (for credit) to learn markdown. It will gives a lot of incentives to learn it. But I would say you and your students are the minority:

1. for many students when they first take a class, they will observe how much workload they would expect (and also how lenient you are to give good grades) from it and decided if they should stay. In the case if you just ask them to learn markdown, it's not really that much workload. It's fine. But I don't think it will stand much chance if we start to introduce terminal/command line, flags, compiling, setting up text editors, raw LaTeX/HTML, etc. (assuming your class is not an advanced class. For advanced classes, one would expect the students to be willing to "do everything"...)

2. last bullet is not critical but this one is: how many instructors are like you? From my experience, I never have seen a lecturer to use markdown/pandoc. If they use LaTeX, they just assume we know it and no workshop. If they use MS Office, we just assume we know it (while not trained in it).

I knew these because I am a graduate student, so I have taken a lot of courses in different disciplines, and in 2 different instuitions with very different culture (hardly a huge stat), and at the same time teaches courses at various level of difficulties (from 1st undergrad to 1st year grad). So this are not make up, albeit not from a large sampling. But if this is true to the university where the author/creator of pandoc is in, at least it reflects part of the truth.

Just to make it clear, none if these are problems of the pandoc cli tool. It's just that the education system as well as the current trend of consumers do not favor this kind of workflow. And then I'm kind of in the "if I can't beat them, join them" spirit to brainstorm what else could happen to help them. 

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John Muccigrosso]

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On Friday, February 3, 2017 at 12:12:01 PM UTC-5, Kolen Cheung wrote:
>
> And then I'm kind of in the "if I can't beat them, join them" spirit to 
> brainstorm what else could happen to help them.
>

And I'm in the "light a candle" camp.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Very interesting. Regarding why GUI might be useful to them:

From what is already offered (non-exhaustive):

1. rmarkdown in rstudio
2. there's a tool mentioned in jgm/pandoc wiki in pandoc-extras that uses MS Word as the "front-end" of pandoc markdown, effectively making MS Word their GUI.
3. Authorea
4. typora

And besides pandoc, for markdown in general:

1. many many web apps for editing markdown, including GitHub themselves.
2. native apps as markdown editor (MultiMarkdown, ByWords, MacDown, Atom, etc.)

So if some people are willing to spend time and/or money to develop/buy these services/app/etc., then there is a demand on this. Where to various degree these tools hide away markdown as a plain text, and the conversion you need to use. The usual kind that has split screens is more traditional (more like code editing with syntax highlight and instant compilation), but there are others (the MSWord thing, Typora, etc.) that completely hide away the internal source (markdown) from the users.

And think about it, some HTML editors (at least more popular in the past) also did the same thing for HTMLs.

Ya, so many people really try to hide away the behind-the-scene sources as much as possible, and anything less would deem to be inferior (subjective but true to them just like how I felt about LaTeX when I first heard it).

---

And more about Google Docs: it is quite disruptive: it is good that it disrupt MS Office in general, but it is bad for other formats, like markdown. I think there should be some real time markdown collaboration that is free, but it seems they stop at collaborating markdown as a "source code". So that's why tools like Authorea is interesting, albeit not free. But I don't really know what company would have both the capability and business incentive to provide a competing tools of Google Docs while is similar to Authorea.

---

Your story about cleaning up those documents for clients (and wife) is very interesting. That kind of make me think about this:

Just like how Linus think using C can shield themselves from crappy/inferior programmers (using C++ is inferior according to him), pandoc's community is kind of like that: mostly the people are more educated, willing to learn, and willing to RT*M. MS Office has taught us that giving a tool with zero entry barrier can results in a lot of lazy users, hence a lot of people not using Word "properly", and causing a lot of problem.

So it seems a corollary to this is, what ever 3rd party effort is trying to make pandoc more accessible, they need to have the manpower to handle lots of "dump" users problems, rather than "polluting" the core pandoc community to make it less maintainable. (something like RStudio that is commercially supported.)

---

What's "light a candle"? When I googled it I only find some Christian sites.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[BP Jonsson]

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When I read my own description it's rather amazing how much effort I've
been willing to make so that I don't have to use a WYSIWYG editor and above
all so that I can use Vim when working. All that is so much easier now
thanks to the effort Jesse has put into docx support in pandoc. Thanks
Jesse!

It's also quite amazing how much I feel like a fish out of the water when I
can't use Vim! If I am so attached to my preferred tools it isn't so
strange that other people are attached to their WYSIWYG tools. After all I
detest WYSIWYG with gusto, so it's only natural that the opposite sentiment
is represented, whatever we think about its prevalence. Most people don't
know they have a choice though.

BTW the vim-pandoc-syntax module by default conceals markdown styling
punctuation, displaying only the bold, italic etc. which they trigger. I
turned that feature off instantly of course, but that's another example of
people putting effort into hiding the markup in favor of more WYSIWYG
display.

Den 4 feb 2017 23:32 skrev "Kolen Cheung" <christian.kolen-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>:

> Very interesting. Regarding why GUI might be useful to them:
>
> From what is already offered (non-exhaustive):
>
> 1. rmarkdown in rstudio
> 2. there's a tool mentioned in jgm/pandoc wiki in pandoc-extras that uses
> MS Word as the "front-end" of pandoc markdown, effectively making MS Word
> their GUI.
> 3. Authorea
> 4. typora
>
> And besides pandoc, for markdown in general:
>
> 1. many many web apps for editing markdown, including GitHub themselves.
> 2. native apps as markdown editor (MultiMarkdown, ByWords, MacDown, Atom,
> etc.)
>
> So if some people are willing to spend time and/or money to develop/buy
> these services/app/etc., then there is a demand on this. Where to various
> degree these tools hide away markdown as a plain text, and the conversion
> you need to use. The usual kind that has split screens is more traditional
> (more like code editing with syntax highlight and instant compilation), but
> there are others (the MSWord thing, Typora, etc.) that completely hide away
> the internal source (markdown) from the users.
>
> And think about it, some HTML editors (at least more popular in the past)
> also did the same thing for HTMLs.
>
> Ya, so many people really try to hide away the behind-the-scene sources as
> much as possible, and anything less would deem to be inferior (subjective
> but true to them just like how I felt about LaTeX when I first heard it).
>
> ---
>
> And more about Google Docs: it is quite disruptive: it is good that it
> disrupt MS Office in general, but it is bad for other formats, like
> markdown. I think there should be some real time markdown collaboration
> that is free, but it seems they stop at collaborating markdown as a "source
> code". So that's why tools like Authorea is interesting, albeit not free.
> But I don't really know what company would have both the capability and
> business incentive to provide a competing tools of Google Docs while is
> similar to Authorea.
>
> ---
>
> Your story about cleaning up those documents for clients (and wife) is
> very interesting. That kind of make me think about this:
>
> Just like how Linus think using C can shield themselves from
> crappy/inferior programmers (using C++ is inferior according to him),
> pandoc's community is kind of like that: mostly the people are more
> educated, willing to learn, and willing to RT*M. MS Office has taught us
> that giving a tool with zero entry barrier can results in a lot of lazy
> users, hence a lot of people not using Word "properly", and causing a lot
> of problem.
>
> So it seems a corollary to this is, what ever 3rd party effort is trying
> to make pandoc more accessible, they need to have the manpower to handle
> lots of "dump" users problems, rather than "polluting" the core pandoc
> community to make it less maintainable. (something like RStudio that is
> commercially supported.)
>
> ---
>
> What's "light a candle"? When I googled it I only find some Christian
> sites.
>
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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Manolo Martínez]

On 02/05/17 at 12:13pm, BP Jonsson wrote:
> It's also quite amazing how much I feel like a fish out of the water when I
> can't use Vim! If I am so attached to my preferred tools it isn't so
> strange that other people are attached to their WYSIWYG tools. After all I
> detest WYSIWYG with gusto, so it's only natural that the opposite sentiment
> is represented, whatever we think about its prevalence. Most people don't
> know they have a choice though.

Another vim + pandoc only (or mostly, see immediately below) user here.

The only use case in which I find text processors useful is when reviewing
student essays---commenting, highlighting etc. CriticMarkup feels somewhat
clunky, and I am aware of no other options.

Manolo

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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This is a huge benefit for plain text (whether it is 
markdown/html/tex/etc.) that we can stick with whichever text editors we 
love to use. And I can understand this feeling, I was a heavy Word users 
(as a relatively young person, I grew up with MS Windows and MS Office) but 
once I'm sold to the plain text camp (and also Unix), I can't go back at 
all.

I can testify the Word reader/writer is a huge time saver! Last semester I 
needed to work with ancient .doc files. I uses some Applescripts to batch 
convert all of them to .docx first and feed it through pandoc to markdown. 
I even wrote some hack-ish scripts using sed to semi-automatically convert 
some Math into equations (to recall, people in the .doc days uses italic to 
type some of the equations, and also uses super-script and lower-script, 
and select Greek alphabets with a popup window. i.e. all just text but not 
properly markup math).

And then I think the feeling towards a text editor can also be said to 
pandoc as a tool itself. I so want to collaborate in pandoc, but it seems 
every other person I need to collaborate with does not know pandoc. And the 
barrier is huge: the markdown syntax itself is not a big problem (I point 
them to CommonMark's introduction as a start), but the editing/compiling 
experience is totally new to them. Last week, I met with a department staff 
and teach him how to work on a project I setup last semester (using pandoc, 
bash, some pandoc filters, makefile), and the first question he asked me 
about editing the pandoc md files is "Is there a GUI for this?".

That department staff used Linux long time ago (i.e. rusty), and he knows 
LaTeX (probably kind of fluent). So this is the point I kept mentioning 
here and there: LaTeX is supposed to be more difficult than pandoc, but 
TeXLive makes LaTeX's experience so much better, e.g. in package management 
and a whole set of utilities that come with it, including a GUI text 
editor. MacTeX is arguably the best among TeXLive experience, but its text 
editor still feel like ancient. But the point is, if there's an official 
text editor for the language, people feel that they can depends on it (e.g. 
all syntax highlight will be correct, there's a button up there to compile 
the project automatically, etc.), and they need not to touch terminal at 
all to process .tex files. This is exactly my experience of LaTeX when I 
first learnt it. Over time, I now don't even uses the GUI provided by 
TeXLive/MacTeX at all, but makefile and latexmk and my own preferred text 
editor, etc. And I now feel this is a much better experience.

So this is to reiterate the point that I don't think currently the pandoc 
as a cli has any problem. It is actually much better. But if there is a GUI 
for beginners, then that GUI will becomes a bridge to a much better path. 
Avid GUI users cannot switch to the pandoc's philosophy (basically Unix 
philosophy in general) and mentality. But if we give them a transitional 
period, we can convert them into avid cli users. At least this is the hope.

Some more thoughts on how to get a pandoc-gui:

1. Atom + packages seems the fastest way to get things done, especially 
there are already packages, albeit not perfect yet.
2. I considered forking/contributing MacDown, an open source (I think MIT) 
markdown text editor on Mac. This will gives a more tailored experience 
(Atom is for hackers from its inception), but more complicated and also not 
multi-platform.

pandoc-gui is on my wish list but of low priorities (frankly I don't have 
the expertise to design a good GUI that's why the above 2 points are about 
building on other's effort), I want to get the things mentioned in the 
ecosystem thread done first (package manager, gallery, and possibly a 
blog). I also wish that someone in a better position does this rather than 
me (I don't even know how to write Atom packages now and there are already 
pandoc users did that).

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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I just experienced this problem yesterday. I'm taking a CS class on supercomputing and doing a group project. One groupmate uses Word, another uses LaTeX. Since we're coding, we already setup a GitHub repo. Having a GitHub repo should means we're free to choose the document language, and preferably plain text for git.

Well, I'm totally defeated: even if we have no trouble coding on github, branching and merging and resolving conflicts, they want real time collaboration on the write-up, because it free us from needing to merge and know exactly what the other guy is writing right now.

Knowing that they want real time collaboration, I suggested HackMD (which I googled). But the guy using Word only refuses to learn it. He said he'd rather pick up LaTeX than to learn markdown and convert to LaTeX later.

In the end, the only choices they gave me are Google Docs or OverLeaf. I choose the lesser evil, Overleaf since LaTeX is still plain text. I will create short automator scripts that convert my markdown (almost) on the fly when doing real time collaboration on OverLeaf. This is as far as I can go to "use pandoc" in such kind of collaboration.

On one hand, I'm so sad that we can't collaborate on pandoc, and see people refusing to learn this but rather learn LaTeX; pandoc still save my day since I can collaborate on LaTeX and use pandoc with Automator to "practically collaborate using pandoc". I'll see how well it goes.

By the way, does anyone knows if you can write in pandoc markdown in Authorea? And can we download the markdown source code from Authorea? I didn't seem to find that option. Not having an academic discount for our university kind of forbid me to suggest using Authorea to them. But at least it has 1 free private repo that I could persuade them to try. But I didn't seem to find a way to download the markdown.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[BP Jonsson]

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In my experience the readiness to approach Markdown, Pandoc or the command
line generally correlates not so much with age as with general tech
interest (geekiness to be honest!), readiness to try new things, previous
exposure to HTML or LaTeX, and -- sadly -- gender, although the latter may
be because geekiness is more prevalent in males.I don't have much
experience with the current teen generation beyond my own 18 year old son,
but I guess that the reason his writing environment of choice is Google
docs is simply its ubiquitous accessibility from any device with a web
browser. I guess that if Pandoc were accessible "in the cloud" he would at
least try it. He was suitably impressed when I could print out his
plaintext guitar scores at different point sizes simply by tweaking a
command in the terminal, so he doesn't in principle prefer a GUI/WYSIWYG
work flow. My preschool grandchildren have all been adept with tablet
computers from very early, which at least is encouraging in that they won't
suffer from tech fright. That said it would certainly help if Pandoc were
ported to Android/iOS! Personally I simply save everything in Dropbox and
convert it later on a desktop computer.I guess anyone geeky enough to try
Pandoc would be prepared to do the same.


Den 2 feb 2017 05:28 skrev "Kolen Cheung" <christian.kolen-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>:

>
>
> On Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 5:59:43 PM UTC-8, John Muccigrosso wrote:
>>
>> On Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 5:22:32 PM UTC-5, Kolen Cheung wrote:
>>>
>>> The first time I heard people submit their paper by programming it in
>>> LaTeX, I really thought they were crazy and old school. I would say people
>>> younger than me in general would think it is impossible to imagine why some
>>> people like to work like we do (using pandoc for example).
>>>
>>
>> In general I wouldn't confuse markdown with latex. Markdown is much
>> easier to explain to people unfamiliar with it and is much more readable
>> as-is.
>>
>
> I would say it is not much about the language but about the workflow. The
> success of MultiMarkdown Composer, Byword, etc. are successful example of
> this. They "hide away" the plain text and source code nature of markdown
> and provide a GUI to bridge their experience. The current generation really
> care about this.
>
>
>>
>>
>>> So, to me, I often worry about the future of tools like pandoc. One of
>>> the solution is "if you can't beat them, join them". i.e. a GUI around
>>> pandoc would hide away the "old-school"ness and get young people on board.
>>> I guess that's why Authorea/ShareLaTeX/etc. are becoming more popular.
>>>
>>
>> It's easy enough on a Mac to script something up. (I've got something
>> <https://github.com/Jmuccigr/AppleScripts/tree/master/pandoc> on my
>> github page, for example.)
>>
>
> I agree. I am saying those young people won't even bother to start using
> it (not to mention learn how to script because of it).
>
> There's some over-generalization here. But I hope the point is clear, the
> majority of the current younger generation really don't have the right kind
> of attitude/world view/workflow/skills to use something like pandoc.
>
> And just to make it clear: I don't think the current pandoc "way" has any
> problem. I am just saying this is a huge gap for young people to pick up.
> The nice thing (or bad thing depending on the perspective) about GUI is the
> end users do not need to learn anything to get start. Sadly, most people
> don't want to learn and yet want to be productive right away. So as an
> educator my perspective is at least one can provide a less steep learning
> curve to inspire people to learn. Once you "lure them in", they will want
> more.
>
> A sidenote: I quite admire the UK education teaching all the young kids
> programming. e.g. the Raspberry Pi foundation kind of project. I wish every
> kid on the planet is taught this way such that the terminal and scripting
> are their "default" on using computers, rather than touch UI, etc.
>
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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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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.

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[BP Jonsson]

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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" <christian.kolen-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>:

> 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.
>
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Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[John Muccigrosso]

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https://twitter.com/jaclark/status/831995345043386368

Google doc export to markdown.

Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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Just a short report on the experience of the collaboration I talked about 
last time when working with teammates in a CS course:

Although we settled for Overleaf, but since the deadline of the assignment 
is very tight, I ran out of time so I directly committed to GitHub in 
pandoc markdown instead of setting up Overleaf for HW1.

On later HWs, I setup automator services that upon invoking a shortcut, the 
select text is converted between TeX and markdown. But even so I found my 
productivity is dramatically reduced (I don’t like the web interface that 
misses features I use in text editors).

In my latest attempt, what I do is to keep a copy of the document in pandoc 
markdown in GitHub, I setup Overleaf as a git submodule. When I need to 
update a document, I look into the diff of the LaTeX, I updated the 
markdown accordingly, and then edit. After finishing edit, I commit it to 
GitHub and convert it back to LaTeX and paste it in Overleaf’s web 
interface (and check the history before pasting in case something changed).

While this sounds complicated, I found that I am much more productive this 
way then to stick to the Overleaf web interface.

To conclude:

   1. 
   
   while it kinds of feels defeated when people don’t want to learn pandoc 
   but rather than LaTeX (that teammate has zero experience on both), pandoc 
   still saves the day because of pandoc’s ability to convert *back and 
   forth between formats* allowing one to collaborate with others that opt 
   for different formats (I think this is especially true when work will 
   people using docx…)
   - In theory, the lossy conversion (non-idempotency) between a round trip 
      of conversions might causes problems. But in my experience often time 
      pandoc does it good enough in some situations. Together with something like 
      Mac’s automator services that you can convert only the part of the text 
      selected, it can be very convenient. 
   2. 
   
   Web interfaces/services might be easier to “lure” people in, say, if 
   there’s a hypothetical pandoc web service similar to Overleaf. But the 
   editing experience there would still diminish one’s productivity. If real 
   time collaborate is not a must, committing to git is so much better (for me 
   at least).
   3. 
   
   I find that different people’s workflow are going to be very different, 
   and very difficult to switch one’s mindset to another’s. The bigger problem 
   is that some productivity tools out there has a *“converging workflow”* 
   (e.g. LaTeX, Word, Google Docs) meaning that the workflow is kind of 
   predetermined and people are falling into pattern and converge to that 
   workflow. But *pandoc’s workflow is very diverging*, meaning that 
   everybody has a different workflow build around them on pandoc. And this is 
   the pros and cons of pandoc. (pros because one can tailored exactly to 
   their own needs and workflow and mindset.) The cons is that it will be very 
   difficult to build the “TeXLive” counter-part of pandoc. It seems that if a 
   unified experience is build around pandoc, might be this is countering the 
   interests of the pandoc community. Thinking in this way, it casks a certain 
   doubt on the feasibility of the dream of the “TeXLive” of pandoc (something 
   like tlmgr, a.k.a. pandocpm, should still be feasible though). I’ll be 
   especially interested in comments on this last point.
   
​

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Malcolm Cook]

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Depending on your workflow, and Theresa's, you might consider the pandoc 
powered gitit <https://github.com/jgm/gitit> wiki from @jgm  which would 
allow Theresa to edit in a web browser and produce markdown on the backside.


On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 12:48:54 PM UTC-6, Joseph wrote:
>
> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
> other users. 
>
> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
> books, and blogs. 
>
> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
> would round trip.) 
> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
> her branch when she's done and merge. 
> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
> on markdown regexes. 
> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text 
> blocks. 
>
> How do other people manage this? 
>

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Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung]

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If setting up a server is not a problem, this is feasible. Note however the 
text editor there has no syntax highlight. There's a preview below when 
clicked, but that's it. And it seems like gitit is put into "maintenance 
mode" and is not under active development any more. There were a maintainer 
for gitit 2.0 but there isn't anything happened.

On Tuesday, February 28, 2017 at 7:35:54 PM UTC-8, Malcolm Cook wrote:
>
> Depending on your workflow, and Theresa's, you might consider the pandoc 
> powered gitit <https://github.com/jgm/gitit> wiki from @jgm  which would 
> allow Theresa to edit in a web browser and produce markdown on the backside.
>
>
> On Monday, January 9, 2017 at 12:48:54 PM UTC-6, Joseph wrote:
>>
>> This isn't really pandoc related specifically, but I am curious about 
>> other users. 
>>
>> I write *everything* in markdown and use pandoc to make slides, articles, 
>> books, and blogs. 
>>
>> None of my peers are up to collaborating in markdown using, say, git. 
>> One option would be to copy my markdown into a Doc. 
>> (Note: I'm not creating a Doc from markdown because I don't know if this 
>> would round trip.) 
>> Say I want feedback from Theresa, I create a branch "theresa," copy the 
>> files into Word files, she edits the docs, I copy her modified text into 
>> her branch when she's done and merge. 
>> This will be weird for Theresa because there won't be any formatting, 
>> although I do have a macro that formats heading and italics and such based 
>> on markdown regexes. 
>> But if we want to use Google Docs, that wouldn't work. 
>> In any case, this is annoying for me because I have to manually port text 
>> blocks. 
>>
>> How do other people manage this? 
>>
>

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