Hi Steve,
Steve Litt wrote on Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 02:31:38PM -0400:
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2019 14:51:42 +0200
> Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote:
>> + Mandoc supports converting your paper to markdown format,
>> just in case you want to publish in on github, too.
> I've heard (and this could be BS) that once you get to Markdown format,
> you can use Pandoc to convert that Markdown to pretty much any format
> you want. I don't know how true that is, or what kind of compromises
> you'd need to make with your control over output formatting.
It is true that Pandoc can do lots of different conversions, though
i never saw a need to use Pandoc or look at it.
But one thing is sure: what you are proposing here is an absolutely
terrible idea. Markdown is a piss-poor markup format. Very little
expressive power, no support for semantic markup whatsoever, weak
standardization (which makes it particularly vulnerable to poorly
working conversions), exceptionally badly context dependent syntax
(which also makes it unusually vulnerable to conversion errors).
When you chain multiple conversions, the quality of the end result
is necessarily less than the MINIMUM of the qualities of all
intermediate formats and converters you travel trough (actually,
even worse: the set of the markup features you can hope to preserve
is a subset of the INTERSECTION of the feature sets of all intermediate
languages and converters you use). So even if Pandoc were a good
converter (which i don't know about), the end result is guaranteed
to be terrible if you travel through markdown.
Actually, the mandoc(1) manual page explicitly warns against using
markdown as an intermediate format, even when targetting HTML, which
is the one and only language that marksdown was developed to support -
so you can expect even worse results for other target languages:
Markdown Output
[...]
Markdown is a very weak markup language, so all semantic markup
is lost, and even part of the presentational markup may be
lost. Do not use this as an intermediate step in converting
to HTML; instead, use -T html directly.
Markdown output mode only makes sense if markdown is your desired
final output format.
Yours,
Ingo
