![IT IT](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/it_64.png)
Google Docs is Finally Adding Markdown Support (arstechnica.com) 18
Google Docs is adding Markdown support, finally. The update, rolling out over the next two weeks, allows users to import, export, copy, and paste Markdown-formatted text. This move comes a decade after Google consolidated its document editing tools into Drive.
Which Flavor? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Which Flavor? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Seriously, I wish Markdown would be replaced by something better. It's awful, especially the way it handles whitespace and newlines, and its total lack of support for tabs. I often find I prefer plain text because of its limitations.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much impossible to improve it for the general case. You can optimize for particular use cases, but anything you add will detract from something else it does.
Markdown, ReStructured Text, and every other system that tries to infer formatting markup from human-readable text is intrinsically very limited. Plain text is just too ambiguous. Once you get beyond a few basic conventions you need explicit markup to format text how you want it. At that point you may as well use a real markup language rather t
Re: (Score:2)
Google Will Still (Score:2)
use your docs in training it's AI, right?
Google docs is trash (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm still flabbergasted at how people actually /use/ that stuff.
Its GUI is absurdly ugly and inelegant. Its functionality is a joke. It was designed to be an even bigger death trap for information than MS Office has been for so many years. It should be avoided by the plague. And actually, it is, but for a cluster of weird people leaving in the marginal corner of the world called the USA.
Re: Google docs is trash (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Google Docs is trash. To your list, I'll add that .gdoc files are a filthy lie -- they're just a text file that has a URL, not your actual data. Your local backups are worthless.
But it's free and it makes it easy to collaborate, so it gets used everywhere. I'm willing to be that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses that now depend on one or more massive shared spreadsheet...
Civilization is doomed.
Re: (Score:2)
Your local backups are worthless.
businesses that now depend
Businesses use backups that actually give you a file that isn't just a shortcut. See AFI, Datto, Spanning, etc. And then some businesses make sure mission-critical spreadsheets have CSV backups.
Civilization is doomed.
Huh, alright. My tenure at our company (using Google Workspace since 2011) has been smooth, and my bank account/life feel like the opposite of doom, but okay.
Re: (Score:2)
some businesses make sure mission-critical spreadsheets have CSV backups.
You can't possibly be serious.
My tenure at our company (using Google Workspace since 2011) has been smooth, and my bank account/life feel like the opposite of doom
So ... because your company pays you a living wage, its okay for them to take a huge and unnecessary risk? That's ... some mighty fine reasoning ...
You seen unusually defensive. I'm guessing you're the one who that made the recommendation to migrate to Google's perpetually beta services?
Re: (Score:2)
What is the huge risk you are talking about?
Re: (Score:2)
What is the huge risk you are talking about?
You can't possibly be serious. Do your organization a favor and find a new profession.
Re: (Score:2)
Vast swathes of the academic world in the EU also use it, because it works better between institutions than the Sharepoint-based solutions the individual institutions have standardised on.
Re: (Score:2)
It should be avoided by the plague.
YMMV but Google Workspace is what we use at our company. I know it is silly but we made the INC 2000.
We are pretty efficient in our office and part of that is we don't worship the formatting gods. We don't run our company out of a spreadsheet (MySQL and PHP handle that).
When you get down to it, money changes hands regardless of the pixel-perfect gradients Photoshop can do over gimp, or jerking off over margins in Word vs Google Documents. It's all 0's and 1's in the end. The sooner people adapt to that,