format will change from LaTeX -> (CommonMark|AsciiDoc): which should we chose?

[Ben Cotton]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:

> Ben, since you raised this issue, I would appreciate if you can say more
> about this.  I've done substantial editing in both in Asciidoc and
> Markdown, and other than the footnote issue (discussed below), I've not
> seen anything where the semantics of Asciidoc seemed stronger, but I've
> admittedly not written anything book-length in any formatting language
> but LaTeX.  Can you explain more?
>
In addition to the footnote issue raised by Aaron, the big features
for me are the ability to easily do callouts (tips, warnings, etc).
For example:

    WARNING: Use of copyleft licenses has been shown to cause
increased awesomeness.

For book-ish documents, those are a killer feature. It also has things
like using (C) to insert a © and other formatting goodness.

> Now, to finally say my own opinion: I struggle most with a simple issue:
> I find Asciidoc harder to read in source form.  Markdown-ish versions
> are really designed to make the text easily readable even without
> running it through the formatter.
>
I fully agree on that. I take notes (particularly for classes and
training sessions) in Markdown because I can just write it without
devoting thought to the syntax, and can convert to HTML or PDF for
review later. It's definitely a bit of a tradeoff, because it makes it
harder for the writer but the finished product is better for the
reader.

> Yes, I didn't mean it would be a 100% manual process, but I suspect I
> want to go paragraph-by-paragraph anyway -- using a formatter and
> committing changes -- for other reasons.  There is another set of
> content-organization changes I want to make simultaneously with the
> format change, but I'll wait to expand on that point until we've
> sufficiently bikeshed Asciidoc vs. Markdown-ish. :)
>
Aw, but I want to bikeshed this now. :-(


Thanks,
BC

-- 
Ben Cotton