Markdown or LaTeX? | Yihui Xie | /en/2013/10/markdown-or-latex/

Guest *Haolai Jiang* @ 2013-10-20 04:19:41 originally posted:

Thank you so much Yihui. It is very helpful.

Guest *Linlin Yan* @ 2013-10-20 08:46:21 originally posted:

Nice picture! :D

@yanlinlin82

Guest *Xiaorui (Jeremy) Zhu* @ 2013-10-20 11:45:50 originally posted:

Definitely agree! Although all roads lead to Rome, some people die at the starting line instead of on the roads.

Guest *Xiaorui (Jeremy) Zhu* @ 2013-10-20 11:46:28 originally posted:

BTW, perfect picture for this topic

Guest *Stian Håklev* @ 2013-10-20 13:26:28 originally posted:

Yeah, whether we need pages or not seems to be the key difference. On the other hand, it's frustrating -- I really like the parsimony of Markdown, where what you are saying stands out, rather than all kinds of formatting and markup. However, I have had problems generating long reports with tons of graphs for colleagues, and wanting to send them a PDF. Even if they are reading it on their computer, most people are not used to receiving HTML files in email (and if they click preview in GMail, it doesn't render - they have to download the file and then open, or I have to host it and send them a link)... When I try to generate a PDF through pandoc etc, the problem isn't the formatting, kerning, fancy layout etc, but purely the positioning of the graphs... (Which also means that when generating a traditional text article without lots of graphs, there are zero problems with generating PDFs from Markdown). I really wish it was possible to generate a PDF with Markdown, with some more control (or automatic intelligence) about graph/image sizing and positioning.

Guest *Me* @ 2013-10-20 20:13:28 originally posted:

Great post. I'm currently struggling to migrate documentation in my new company from Word to something plain-text-based. I went for rst format though (with Sphinx as publication tool - any opinions on that?). And I ran exactly into the problems you described: while optimizing for one presentation format (PDF) the other (html) looked more and more ugly, what with fixed image sizes and stuff like that. Plus the sources get meanwhile cluttered with raw latex commands (so much for the simple single source publishing).

But then, maybe one just needs to become a bit more relaxed and let the Latex backend so whatever it wants - it's still a major improvement over Word-based documentation... :)

Guest *dhduncan* @ 2013-10-20 21:49:28 originally posted:

Very useful, I was having a partially informed discussion with colleagues about this at the pub on Friday.

I made my first R Sweave doc earlier that day, not because i wanted pages so much as wanting Figure captions, which don't seem to be easily accommodated in markdown.

It did seem like a considerable investment of time though, even with TexShop providing me with templates for many elements of fine-tuning.

Guest *M. Edward (Ed) Borasky* @ 2013-10-21 05:22:09 originally posted:

It turns out that it's easy to make HTML/EPUB/MOBI or PDF ebooks that look good without a lot of effort. However, starting from a single source document in any language - Markdown, LaTeX, Word, or any of the other text-based markup tools - and creating both HTML/EPUB/MOBI and PDF is a royal pain. I honestly don't know how O'Reilly and Manning do it, although O'Reilly's tool chain is based on Asciidoc. I suspect there are expensive human editors in their workflow.

The problem I have with Markdown is that it only does the barest minimum of HTML. You have to know real HTML (and CSS) to make actual documents or websites anyhow, so you end up with a mix of Markdown and HTML in your source document. Moreover, there are at least three variants of Markdown syntax you need to worry about - Github's, RStudio's and Pandoc's. IMHO you're better off writing your source document in RHTML using RStudio and Bluefish and knitr than messing around with Markdown.

Guest *Devin Pastoor* @ 2013-10-21 16:39:19 originally posted:

Does anyone have any experience with the commenting aspect of kniting to HTML? Giving an Word/pdf report to a higher-up to so they can review and comment on is unfortunately here to stay for many people (myself included). Are there any tools that allow for commenting on HTML documents. Obviously sharing the source .md/etc to allow for collab via version control is possible for the tech savy, but I'm looking for a solution that is as simple as highlight section of interest, click comment and type.

Guest *Aleksandr Blekh* @ 2014-08-14 15:02:11 originally posted:

Hi, Yihui! Just ran across this post - nice overview. I was wondering, if you could give me an advice. It's somewhat early to be bothered with this now, but I prefer to think early about outcome. My situation is as follows. Currently, I'm working on Ph.D. dissertation (Information Systems). All my theoretical chapters (the usual introduction, literature review and methodology) are written (in MS Word) long time ago and approved (contain mostly text with some figures and tables). While working on quantitative parts of my dissertation, the more I read and worked, the more I became enthusiastic about reproducible research.

Since the software that I'm developing to support my research is being written in R, using knitr and/or R Markdown seem like a natural route to take. As my research involves standard statistical analysis and SEM, I expect the writeup of results and discussion to likely contain a fair amount of plots (EDA) and tables (SEM) with corresponding textual descriptions, all, hopefully, auto-generated as a reproducible report. With that in mind, I think I have two options: 1) generate my dissertation's quantitative part report via R Markdown and/or knitr, convert it to PDF, then convert my theoretical part in Word also to PDF, then merge them together; 2) similarly to #1, generate the report, but then convert it to Word and then merge two parts in Word together (my committee chair is OK with either Word, or PDF). Ideally, I would like to have a freedom to have a source flexible enough to generate final document in any of these formats. There is also a third option, which is to convert everything into LaTeX, but I doubt it's feasible for me, as A) I would have to master LaTeX from the scratch; B) my dissertation report will have minimal amount of math formulas or complex diagrams, if any.

What, in your opinion, would be the optimal approach to producing the final document with least amount of time, most flexibility and good quality?

Guest *Maximilian Held* @ 2015-02-23 20:40:52 originally posted:

I'm wondering whether you'd stick by this post, Yihui – or whether given the recent (impressive) additions to RMarkdown v2, it really is getting closer to a jack of all trades ... (I'd like that – and I see ever fewer cases for really using LaTex.

Sometimes it can be really hard to wait for the (open-science, reproduceable, open-source)-future :).

Guest *Geza* @ 2015-05-14 20:14:37 originally posted:

What I plan to do is to use Rmd for everything. Then if I need that content in a document that needs special formatting, I convert that to LaTeX, and incorporate that, and add as little extra formatting as necessary. (Thereby duplicating that particular text; but I can name its origin in the LaTeX source.) I don't have much experience with it yet, but it seems to be a feasible way. What do you think?

Guest *Bai Victor* @ 2015-09-10 19:42:50 originally posted:

Interesting. Thx for sharing.

Guest *dinraum* @ 2015-10-05 07:27:53 originally posted:

Check out Texpad for IOS and OSX. Texpad will do Latex and Markdown at the same time.

Guest *Magdalena* @ 2016-03-06 18:13:21 originally posted:

Hello.
Good text. I would like to dispute one thing: do we have to print homeworks?
I'm academic, so I have to read documentation for projects lots of student's essays, draft of theses... And yes, it is a huge difference to read something on screen and printed on paper. First of all - I do not want to sit any more. Reading on screen requires me to sit and work with computer. Even if I took tablet - screen is so small to comfortable reading, searching for erroros and so on. Paper frees me - I can take sheets almost everywhere, I can read in direct sunlight, do not have to worry about battery even being off-road - during break in trip ;) i can work anytime and everywhere.
Second, probably difficult to understand for young people are limitations of own body. When I was younger I was able to work with computer even a dozen hours without problem with backbone. Without problem with reading.... Now, when I have to have eyeglasses it is wores for me to read on bright screen (e-inks are ok).
Third, I think most important: I noticed (especially on longer reports/theses) that when reading on screen more mistakes and errors remains undetected than wher read on printed version. Also searching for repetitions, working with logical stucture is easier when you have sheets of paper with color marks/notes placed on table or on floor, alongside - and then you can see all from "birds" point of view. And you can move and relocate them.
This is impossible during linear reading on screen, only one page/screen at time...
Concerning Markdown and LaTeX: I'm using both. Markdown for instructions for students, entries to blog - things that do not requires sophisticated layout. When i need just basic formatting, tables, lists, pictures, codes, some not complicated equations - markdown is enough. When I need to prepare article for journal or book with many referrences, equations, theorems, proofs - LaTeX is my leader.
In short: in short, not complicated texts, in humanities markdown should be enough. In long, complicated text, in STEM markdown may lack some features.

Guest *Fernando Hoces De La Guardia* @ 2016-05-06 16:57:46 originally posted:

Hi Yihue,
I am trying to do something similar the format of Hadley's book but I don't know jekyll. In my toolbox I have knitr, markdown and latex. Do you have some recomendation/example?

Guest *Bruno Longo* @ 2017-06-29 16:25:10 originally posted:

Nice article! But something maybe you were missing then: adding page print CSS makes a nice typesetter, as seen in https://alistapart.com/article/boom. I've been searching a way for inputting simple markdown-like text and outputting fine PDF through CSS help. Trying pandoc as of now.

Guest *hotus94* @ 2017-09-12 09:39:37 originally posted:

Hello I know that it's not new post but there is Modoko(https://www.madoko.net/) that can do both latex and markdown in the same file and is online(for me, unfortunatelly sometimes) so it is possible to edit everything in one document online.

Regards.

Guest *ch3o* @ 2018-02-14 07:42:45 originally posted:

Thank you for this post, it's a good summary...but I think is not exhaustive of the main problem on markdown and latex with the "real" world...

99% of my colleagues does not want to know anything about Markdown and Latex, and they want to keep continuing on track change doc or docx... unfortunately I never found any tool capable to properly convert tex or markdown in doc/docx without a lot of problems (above all when the documents contains a lot of tables and or formulas...this is quite frustrating...

I know I sound a bit trolling here, but I am not, I am really frustrated...Thank you for your work and your dedication Yiuhui!

Guest *BigBadWolf* @ 2022-10-03 15:54:11 originally posted:

Very well said!