For me, as I wish for a markdown version that work for blogs, notes and knowledge management, technical and academic writings and long form writing aka ebooks, I miss a lot in markdown that other formats offer.
For me. The most thing I miss about markdown is styling the text. With markdown I can’t style it the way I could with dedicated text editors for technical, academic writings and ebooks.
For example:
I can’t position the images/charts/figures in a place I want, like a beside a text or in other difficult positions, like the way magazines or academic journal can do.
I can’t use different fonts for different lines
I can’t colorize the text
I can’t change the size of images
the Damn Citations issues
autocomplete for Citations
WYTIWYG when printing to PDF, markdown doesn’t support pagination, good luck with getting what you want in PDF form.
text position and direction, just click where I want and start typing.
it’s 2022 why we still in the 2002? I wish to do my title the way I can with latex.
For me this features is what I wish for in a new Markdown flavor. what about you?
Markdown was created to make blog writing easier. Before Markdown everything had to be written in HTML. CSS came along to format HTML (and markdown). Check out the rabbit hole that is CSS Plain Text is designed to be accessible on all platforms. What you are looking for is an academic word processor like Mellel (https://www.mellel.com) or an RTF program. Most PDF programs will accept markdown as input. Markdown will remain a plain text enhancing program.
I don’t see how you can achieve this with any legitimate extension of markdown. But markdown is old and not designed for the uses you describe. Some of what you want could be achievable through a new plaintext language, but establishing it would be very slow going. Most programmers and heavy plaintext users aren’t interested in the same features as you.
Some of what you are looking for is done through CSS. The question would be where would that CSS be saved on a per document basis. Maybe YAML or equivalent. In which case, your editor would have to translate your WYSIWYG instructions into the yaml. Not impossible but a little oppositional to the current markdown ethos.
Rich text programs, of course, integrate both the text and display into one file already. You’ll have noticed that Interoperability between markdown editors and rich text programs is typically poor, and many markdown editors are dead set against making it easier.
Files based markdown editors are stuck with pure markdown. Database apps are frequently more flexible, can mix and match components (they can choose to accept markdown syntax and save it internally into a rich text format if they choose; or vice versa) and have a higher proportion of users who need Interoperability with word processors.
At the end of the day, it’s a rapidly evolving PKM scene with new programs emerging all the time. Rather than dreaming of a better fit markdown language, you are likely to do better by using programs that are the best fit for your requirements.
and there is NOTHING wrong with keeping notes in plain text, and using CSS to make it look better. That’s what most HTML web design programs do. I write 95% of my output in plain text.
I know about all these programs that do rich text and do all that fancy stuff, personally I was using latex (the dominate of academic writing), but it’s ugly language with runic syntax. I just wish for markdown flavor for academic writing.
The provision that most markup language left open for meta-datas or future extensions, so that different tools and needs can be accomodates without creating frankeinstein needed consequent look ahead just in order to parse the right syntax. If it has meta-data they could be used for tons of things that are not about visuals (markdown is 50% structure and 50% formatting, and couldn’t really figure out what way to stand), the result i feel is a lack of structure that makes embedding things into each other very cumbersome. Just see how things will start to fall appart when you want to build a simple table, and nightmarish when you want to include rich things inside the tables.
Well HTML (HyperTextMarkUPLanguage) does very complex tables with visuals quite nicelly. MarkDown was created to be a bit simpler (Hence Down vs Up). And before HTML was Split into being just for page description and CSS was for page design, it was all in 1 document. If you need to do complex tables, write them in HTML. HTML is not that hard to use, and the results speak for themselves (most of the WWW is done in HTML).
In the good news department, Obsidian does actually support the resizing of embedded pictures. You just use the format ![[link|width in pixels]], like this:
For OP’s requirements, it sounds like Asciidoc would be a better match (although without the support in Obsidian) …
Sticking with the Markdown side of things, it’s a matter of reconciling all the flavors of Markdown that have popped up over the years (Markdown, CommonMark, Github Markdown, R Markdown, Pandoc Markdown, etc.) as well as all the extensions (R Markdown, Pandoc Markdown, Literate, CoffeeScript, Codebraid, MATLAB, Ganesha, etc.) – what you want is probably available already, trying to find it is the issue (ex. for robust citations, you’re looking at the trinity of Markdown+Pandoc+Zotero)
I wish I had not followed that link to Asciidoc… Now I am saddened that we will likely never see a version of Obsidian that works with that, when it’s clearly superior to Markdown.
There is already a perfect markdown extension proposal that extends MD for long form, inline level annotation, bloc level annotation, and more : MystMarkdown https://mystmd.org/
With the added bonus of integrating the Python Sphinx et JupyterLab ecosystems.
MystMarkdown open new doors for MD that Obsidian plugins could piggyback on in powerful ways.
Obsidian already expanded the syntax to use it in certain case :
[[link to pdf | page=x]]
[[link to image|height=y]].
I would love it to be usable for regular links as well.
In general i would like markdown to add the concept of meta data to paragraphs as well, it would be convenient for quotes (add author, references), for tasks (add deadline, progress, dependencies), adding unique ID to a paragraph for referencing. If markdown had metadata for pages, yaml frontmatter wouldnt be required as well.
So for me markdown lacks support for metadata at every level to add informations that don’t need to appear visually in the document or be necessarily rendered, but contextualize the content and can be formatted / rendered in CSS if one so wishes.
Also probably a way to do “indent” (alinéa in french). In France (maybe in other country too?) we use them a lot for our literature writing. I love them to change an idea for new paragraph, but not always (so css can’t work here).
I found some way to write them, but none seems native as they are in Word.
MyST Markdown will be a very powerful format that improves Markdown and you can merge executable content like in Jupyter Notebooks.
If Obsidian can support MyST Markdown documents there will be a synergy between both systems.
MyST support captioning images, cross references, side notes, Mermaid diagrams, bibliography, etc.
More info at MyST Markdown Tools - MyST Markdown
Self-defining characters responsible for text formatting (customizable syntax?)
Self-defining text formatting styles - if I don’t need italics, I won’t create italics for myself, and if I need red text formatting, I will create it for myself. It is up to me to determine what formatting I will have and what formatting I will not have. Free to delete/modify it. I should be given different options to decorate the text, not have formatting styles defined for me.
For both of these (↑) functions, simply writing information about syntax characters, and how they decorate text, to the config file will suffice.
If I keep thousands of notes with me on a regular basis, I suppose saving another text config file shouldn’t be a problem.
But instead, having to keep creating additional files and messing around with CSS is insane.
ontheexam attached a screenshot from the “Ulysses” software in one of comments (Break Markdown: Option to change default tab / indent behavior / Do not create code block - #3 by ontheexam) - this could be implemented in a similar way, only more flexible.
… this applies not just to links, but to any type of attachment, examples of which I couldn’t find hastily.
Something to make using and viewing pasted images in a file more comfortable (refers to WYSIWYG, noted above, I believe)
If I insert a full-size image into a note, I often have to scroll too much
If I reduce the size of the inserted images to 65% using CSS, I have to open the images in a new tab to see it in more detail
If I install the Image Toolkit plugin, I can’t access the image link just by clicking on it, and the system feels more cluttered because of the extra plugin - which I really don’t like (I only use 2 plugins - Dataview and Text Format).
Now it’s gotten to the point where I don’t insert any attachments as preview links (![[[]]), but as regular links ([[[]]), and if necessary, hover over the image link, and use the Page Preview plugin to view a thumbnail of the image, and if necessary, open the image in a new tab - that way at least the images don’t get in the way among the text, and don’t cause all the discomfort. It’s still very uncomfortable, but for me it’s the best thing right now.
I wish Obsidian would eventually abandon Markdown, and develop their own, more flexible and customizable plain-text file format.
I once saw a forum post from someone saying “I didn’t choose obsidian - I chose markdown.”. And in my case it is exactly the opposite. I don’t understand how one can love markdown with all its limitations and inconveniences, and why such a limited tool is still relevant nowadays.
Plain Text is designed to be accessible on all platforms. What you are looking for is an academic word processor like Mellel (