Sounds like you got lucky. We never did find out what happened to Hannah after she got sucked through that rift in the time-space continuum.
And that’s why we use LaTeX, kids. Or Typst.
Maybe it’s the programmer in me, but I’ve found that markdown is more than sufficient for formatting the vast majority of what I write. Plus, I find it way easier to search through plain text files.
Sure, markdown is great for basic formatting and simple structure. Actual typesetting is a completely different problem domain though.
It’s not exactly the appropriate tool for having your math-heavy doctoral dissertation or latest book published. I wouldn’t base my printed business correspondence on markdown either.
That’s completely fair! I was just noting that notepad++ and some whitespace has almost entirely replaced Word in my writing workflow, since I don’t tend to write anything with the intent of printing it (mostly just personal notes and programming documentation). Plus, my train of thought was along the lines of a bulleted outline that’s meant to be replaced in situ with actual writing.
That said, I have used LaTeX a bit though and I remember it being super neat once I got the hang of it! I had some grad school papers that needed journal style formatting and slapping an import at the top of the file and moving on with my life was far and away easier than fighting with Word. Come to think of it, it might be worth taking a stab at formatting my resume with LaTeX, just to see if document parsers have an easier time with it…
Oh, I quite agree. Always use the right tool for the job. As Einstein put it, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.
If you’re thinking of jumping back into typesetting because you have the occasional need for that too, you might want to have a quick look at the aforementioned Typst, which aims to be a modernized successor to LaTeX. It can’t compete with the sheer volume of work people have done in TeX over the years to typeset everything from manuals to orchestral note sheets, but it is considerably more humane to work with. In the simplest use cases, it’s not that far from markdown, really. It’s also very nice that content and presentation is entirely decoupled.
I think chances are good that you’d like it.
Write in Markdown, convert to LaTeX, typst, Word, Google doc at some point. Markdown usually doesn’t have an index function (which makes sense since it doesn’t have pages) but you’ve already done all the work with headers and subheads. Maybe add a newpage / pagebreak here and there and Bob’s your uncle.
The only thing missing from markdown is comments.
Uh, I suppose you could do that in very simple situations where you don’t need any layout control or advanced typography and just want to nicely typeset some text for print or distribution.
As for the only thing missing from markdown being comments: Sorry, but I can’t follow you there. CTAN currently hosts 6827 packages written by 3105 contributors, all of which covers things markdown cannot even remotely do.
Similarly, Typst currently has 478 contributed packages.
Don’t take that as criticism. Markdown isn’t meant to do any of those things.
According to the length and complexity of the document, I use either Markdown, groff+mom or LaTeX. But to be honest, I don’t have a lot of occasions to use LaTeX anymore…
I have IT clients where I would not be surprised if a ticket like this came in. I’ve had clients halfway done reinstalling windows asking me if their work-critical OneDrive files (that we weren’t aware of) had backed up (OneDrive hadn’t run in months)
Really thought this was gonna be a vim joke
This really reminds me of The Laundry Files. It’s a novel series wherein there is a secret highly bureaucratic British occult agency whose members are largely conscripted mathematicians, computer scientists, etc. See, spellwork is really just advanced mathematical computations that ties into the fabric of reality. And when these people accidently work out some algorithm that will tear a hole into space-time or otherwise stumble upon the supernatural nature of the universe, they are forcibly hired into the The Laundry and magically bound from ever sharing this knowledge with anyone not in the know.
It is not uncommon in this universe for somone to accidently write programs that summon demons or eldritch threats to the cosmos.
See Facebook also
“Anyway, since you’re here, can you do something about autotune?”
“While you’re here…”
Obligatory
I got turned into Freakazoid once when my cat walked across the keyboard and I went to delete what ended up being typed in. Fun times.
