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Comment by lenkite

6 years ago

Prefer Asciidoc over Markdown. Easier to remember syntax, richer set of controls and more importantly - better tables. Tables in Markdown are a nightmare. Asiidoc is a lifesaver for tables. For big tables, columns can be specified as rows leading to sane reading.

13 comments

lenkite

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swiley  6 years ago

I like asciidoc because latex math is part of the standard and not something you may or may not get like with markdown. There are a couple of other nice things (like tables) too.

I think the complexity of asciidoc is probably why there are only a couple implementations though, which is a real bummer.

rambojazz  6 years ago

IMO Asciidoc tables can get messy quite soon, to the point that at that point I'll just use HTML.

zimpenfish  6 years ago

Multimarkdown tables are fairly straightforward, no? From a blog post about the linear typewriters last year, a simple table (unformatted because I'm lazy.)

    input file | my score | article score | ratio
    -----------|----------|---------------|------
    stripped.txt | 5262321 | 5499341 | 95.7%
    s2.txt | 5510008 | 5499341 | 100.2%

vs

    .Table Scores
    |===
    | input file | my score | article score | ratio

    | stripped.txt
    | 5262321
    | 5499341
    | 95.7%

    | s2.txt
    | 5510008
    | 5499341
    | 100.2%
    |===

And that's just two lines of four columns - I've got blog posts with 20 lines of 5 columns. It would be heartbreaking to type that in.

  • phlyingpenguin  6 years ago

    I vastly prefer adoc's tables because I don't need to concern myself with aligning anything to figure out what's what.

    • zimpenfish  6 years ago

      A fair concern. For me it doesn't work because the table headers aren't laid out the same way as the rows and that's just two ways of confusion.

sandGorgon  6 years ago

prefer asciidoc because its a well defined standard and is just as simple to use as markdown.

and yes - tables are much nicer in asciidoc

gerikson  6 years ago

I just ”shell out” to HTML for tables.

  • Carpetsmoker  6 years ago

    HTML tables are hard to write, read, and edit though. If you want to make the document easily readable both as HTML and Markdown (quite useful for a README, I think) then it's not a very good option.