John MacFarlane

> Try pasting in 10 * characters and you'll see that it's almost impossible.

Works fine for me: https://i.imgur.com/QssB5YV.gif

Note that:

• The premise of the app is that you type or paste in Markdown syntax, and see the corresponding rendered output in the editor (except when the cursor is inside that area). As asterisks have a special meaning in Markdown, you should expect to see bold text (rather than the asterisks) when you type or paste something like asterisk-asterisk-foo-asterisk-asterisk.

• The intended meaning of ten asterisks in a row is hard to predict from the Markdown syntax definition. Their rendering as two bold asterisks seems to be not what the majority of Markdown converters do, but according to Babelmark it is consistent with a few, including the original Markdown.pl: https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?text=Asterisks+on+the+next+line%3A%0A**********%0AAnd+on+the+same+line%3A+********** (Of course, it is best to avoid any such edge cases where Markdown converters differ; CommonMark notwithstanding.)

People who don't use TeX for accessibility reasons might want to give it another look. The tooling has risen in quality and accessibility hugely of late. I use TexPad[1] - which I like enormously.

Otherwise, as another commenter mentioned, there is always Markdown. Combined with MathJax[2] and custom style sheets you see many of the same benefits with greatly increased simplicity. A great desktop Markdown editor (if people don't like web based ones) is Mou[3].

Lastly - the advantage to using Markdown is that if you have to work with someone who does use TeX - something like pandoc[4] can be used to convert between formats fairly nicely.

One thing I think is missing is a "Make" like program to dictate how to combine multiple Markdown or TeX documents into a single document, which folders to scan for references etc. I've seen a couple of home grown solutions - but nothing that really fit the bill.

[1]: https://www.texpadapp.com/

[2]: http://www.mathjax.org/

[3]: http://mouapp.com/

[4]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

It seems that the terminology is causing some confusion. The definition of a wiki is "a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser" [1], which is pretty much the opposite of "static." I assume that what you want is a static site generator that has organisational features that are common in wiki software...

My favourite wiki software is Gitit [2]. It uses Pandoc [3] to convert from an input format (such as Markdown) to HTML. Perhaps you could write a simple script that iterates through all source files and renders the HTML to a destination directory using Pandoc, creating any subdirectories as required. That minimal solution should be very easy to implement; adding organisational markup within the HTML would require some programming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

[2] http://gitit.net/

[3] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

I really hope that they borrow a lot if not everything from pandoc[1]. My only real complaint with pandoc is the table formatting, but I think fiddlosopher is adding org-mode like table support.

If you have not taken a pandoc for a spin I highly recommend you do so soon. In addition to being a great markdown dialect the pandoc tool set is the swiss army knife of text formatting. It is amazing how many formats pandoc can read and/or write.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html

EDIT: I spoke too soon, Fiddlosopher continues to impress. I just checked the open issues and a little less than a month ago he added "limited org-table support." Based off of the rest of pandoc "limited" probably means something like 85% to 95% :)

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/519

There are a couple of alternatives that I find quite useful.

For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort.

For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams.

Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.

I think this is great, I'm all for extending markdown for specific situations but I think the base h1, li, and p tags should be clearly defined. It appears that most parsers could adopt most of the spec without breaking backwards compatibility. (I'm probably wrong.)

There's an obvious annoyance with markdown like this, where a lack of a blank line after the headlines causes problems but only in a few parsers. I'm glad to see most of them do the right thing.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=%23+I+love+this+stuff%0A%23%23+A+LOT!%0A-+li+1%0A-+li+2!