![]() (The native Mac app has helped a lot with that as well.) We have a lot of content in Notion now, and it's been pretty easy to keep that updated and to jump around. It's not perfect, but they've been hammering out the major bugs and shortcomings we hit when we first started, and recently pushed a big update that improved how free/paid teams work, added namespaces for pages, and a handful of other improvements here and there. Notion continues to improve pretty much constantly (I get excited when I get the blue banner at the top of the UI saying there are new updates), and the people we've interacted with there have been fantastic. We moved to Notion, and while it's certainly more complex in what it can do, it's met our needs far better than Paper and even Hackpad have. We were using Hackpad like a wiki, and Paper just wasn't (at the time, at least) built to really be effective for public content like that. While a good product, it wasn't really good enough for what we needed. We started off with Hackpad and used that for years, and tried moving to Dropbox Paper when Hackpad was end-of-lifed. Hence the modern office formats, tolerably doing a huge spectrum of things, none of them brilliantly, and hopelessly complicated. They'd rather bend an existing tool, because how hard it is to add spans of colored text? or collapsed sections? It's, like, a hundred lines of code! Many of them would consider having two tools for these jobs superfluous, especially if paid. The funny thing is, the same people periodically need one tool and the other, and even want to mix them. A format that makes one of these easy adds complications and edge cases to the other. These two camps command different design goals. Other want to print centered headers on level 1, and left-aligned for level 2, and body text with a particular font, with fragments in a different color, and pictures with text flowing around them, etc. Some want rendering-agnostic structure, like Wiki / Markdown / Org mode, that emphasizes structure and text, with things like links, tags, etc. One of the problems is that people want different things from a "simple document format". Sure it transparently to that in the background, but I shouldn't have to worry about it. Not use asterisks everytime whenever I want to make something bold. ![]() And by WYSISWYG, I mean I want to type, and press Ctrl+B to write in bold, and Ctrl+I for italic and right click to insert hyperlink and so on. I'm looking into ASCIIDOC but even that looks like it's very similar to markdown. ![]() So formats which require me to render to HTML etc, are a no go. Other times, it's really not worth the effort. I really like it, but only pull it out when I need to write a paper and want the output in PDF. I do use LaTeX but only when I need ultra sharp looking documents with specific needs. ![]() This really hurts productivity when you're editing large documents and increases the barrier for new comers. I don't really have time to spend doing the edit->render->see where you went wrong->edit cycle. I'm looking for a WYSISWYG tool, like google docs/docx. I'm still waiting for some of those applications to properly handle a big file and I don't want to wait so long for those applications to even open.ĮDIT: Thanks for the replies. I'm interested to see that does everyone else use for documents? And please don't suggest docx+open/libre office. I'm talking about how markdown never actually stores pictures inside the document, but just links to them, and you'll have to use a specific application to view the rendered markdown, and a different one to edit or make new ones. I've seen people talk about stuff like org-mode, etc, but they all lack the fluidity and the WYSIWYG nature of Google docs, docx etc. When ever I try to maintain documents for long term storage, markdown seems like the only good format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx.Ī quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before)Īll of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using Google Docs) try to tie the user as close to their eco-system as possible.
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