Be sure to watch the video on it Writer’s page to appreciate the implementation. Very well done it looks.
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This is an easy +1. I use AI a lot, and I’m currently not pasting anything into Obsidian because I’m too scared I’ll forget what I wrote and what still needs to be double-checked. I think this is a necessary feature for academic integrity, and a step towards multiplayer mode besides.
3 Likes
I love this idea. My Javascript coding skills aren’t up to being the implementor, but I will provide help.
Fascinating. This would be great in obsidian. Downloading IA Writer right now.
Plus one here. Quick visual way to distinguish source of pasted material would be most welcome.
Given that support for Critic Markup is a long-standing request, I’d much rather see that implemented first. But having both would be great. Support Critic markup
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If you’d said “given that Critic Markup is a more useful request” and given reasons, I might be more inclined to agree. But it seems that this thread in 9 days has already exceeded the interest the other thread has received in 2.5 years. I read through the spec and the other support thread, and I can’t see myself ever using Critic Markup, but I can see myself using these Markdown Annotations every day.
On the CriticMarkup GitHub there’s an issue where someone is/was doing a plugin but found they need an extension to the CriticMarkup syntax for it to work.
Personally, I’d think a wider value would depend on the other programs using it and I don’t think CriticMarkup has hit any critical mass. Quite a few users do also use iAWriter.
Though whether that’s worth extending the accepted markdown syntax even further idk. There are many requests for useful extensions which have quite a few users in the wide markdown community which haven’t been acted on. But that would never be any issue if it were a plugin,
Okay, here’s why CriticMarkup is more important:
People complain about the dominance of Word and .docx, but for markdown to ever have a prayer of being adopted more in business, education, and government, there needs to be a way to for multiple users to add comments and track/accept/reject changes as you can in Word, and CriticMarkup is the only option I’m aware of for that.
It would also be very useful for solo users such as longform writers to make notes to themselves and make tentative edits on working drafts. (That’s why Scrivener offers similar features.)
Obsidian already has comments, but they’re closer to iA Writer’s implementation of annotations than to CriticMarkup’s functionality.
So the addition of CriticMarkup would close a bigger gap in Obsidian’s current feature set than iA’s version of annotations would.
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Any app that supports MultiMarkdown supports CriticMarkup.
As far as I’m aware, MultiMarkdown is the most feature-complete of the various markdown flavors, and it’s a general-purpose spec, rather than being designed for a narrow and specific use case like GFM.
I’m aware of that, but Obsidian has steadily not gone down the road of MMD rather than GFM/Common mark.
whether that’s worth extending the accepted markdown syntax even further idk.
There is no single accepted markdown syntax. Commonmark tried to create a canonical spec, but John Gruber rejected it, arguing that the lack of a single spec is a strength of markdown. He even asked them to take markdown out of the name. Now Commonmark is just another competing standard.
Obsidian has also not steadily gone down the road of following iA Writer’s lead.
The Word and docx implementation of comments, tracking changes etc is infinitely better than anything that seems likely to be built with CriticMarkup. And part of that superiority is that users can rely on all other users, even ones they don’t know yet, having access to programs that have that functionality. CriticMarkup has been around a long time - 10+ years - and has never achieved anything other than a very limited take-up; and most of that was at the beginning.
Yeah, nothing is likely to supplant Word as the de facto business standard in the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean other options, be they LibreOffice, Apple Pages, and, yes, CriticMarkup shouldn’t exist or can’t be useful to a subset of users. (For that matter, a case can be made that iA annotations duplicates functionality found in Word’s track changes feature.)
The thing that makes CriticMarkup different is that it’s plaintext and markdown based, and afaik there isn’t really another option available for that. It’s not simply reinventing the wheel the way also-ran rich text word processors are. Unfortunately, at this point most users (even most markdown users) aren’t aware that CriticMarkup exists, so they can’t be said to have rejected it.
CriticMarkup has been around a long time - 10+ years - and has never achieved anything other than a very limited take-up
Again, that doesn’t prove that it wouldn’t be useful to lot of people if it were made available in a popular app like Obsidian, which likely has a far larger user base than iA Writer at this point, even though iA Writer was around for years before Obsidian even existed.
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One thing that confuses me is that even though iA calls it an “open format,” published the spec on GitHub, and says “We are open to working with other apps to adapt the idea in some form, ideally establishing a standard,” they also say:
While the format is open, avoid cloning our work. Draw inspiration from what we made. Change it. Improve it. Design it yourself. Work on it until it is substantially better. If you can’t beat our design, then let it be and do something else.
So do they want other apps to adopt it or not? Or are they asking for some sort of control over how it’s implemented in other apps? What do they think constitutes “cloning” a supposedly open spec?
It’s not the spec, it’s the implementation and design. And they do seem to be hypersensitive to having their ideas stolen. They lamented that Word came out with an implementation of focus mode within weeks of them launching theirs; idk if that’s true but other programs had a focus mode before iAW and Word’s implementation is different and arguably better (now at least).
I think it’s fair enough - they would like to see their syntax taken up more widely, but don’t want to see lots of other programs looking and functioning exactly like their own. Apple would sue, but I doubt iAW has the money.
Maybe, but surely that’s an issue for the thread requesting CriticMarkup (28 likes thus far).
And what exactly are your issues with just using Fevol’s Commentator plugin? (Again any replies ought to go to its own thread).
surely that’s an issue for the thread requesting CriticMarkup
You were the one who brought it up here. 
I’ll try Fevol’s plugin when it hits the community plugins.
iA annotations could be implemented as a plugin, too.
They lamented that Word came out with an implementation of focus mode within weeks of them launching theirs; idk if that’s true but other programs had a focus mode before iAW
iA Writer has always included features that may have been ubiquitous when they added them, but were first pioneered in other specific apps—including Microsoft Word—long before iA Writer existed and copied them.