[Hitch]

Originally Posted by nikkie

I like this idea. I've been advocating it among my more tech-saavy friends for a long time.

The terrible markup created by Word can cause a lot of problems when converting documents to different formats. Word is not a "source" editor, so you don't really have full control of the actual markup, and lots of weird things can happen to your document that you won't even notice until you try to convert it to a real format that can be used in an eReader, and you suddenly notice that half of your book is composed of a broken list or some such.

Nikkie:

I have to say, that this is only the case when someone does NOT use Styles; when someone uses ad hoc typing. Anyone who can use Markdown to write a manuscript can, in about 20 minutes, learn to use Word well enough to export what is basically a squeaky-clean, ready-for-a-matching stylesheet HTML file. It's not hard. And it requires absolutely no use of "the built-in dropdown menus" that you refer to in the next paragraph. It's less demanding than using Markdown.

I've said this repeatedly here and I'll say it again: the whole hoohah about Word creating garbage is, well, garbage. Yes, if John Doe gets a hold of Word, and just types willy-nilly, he'll output crap as HTML. But I guarantee you I can take a completely crappy file, and without using the dreaded SW "nuke" method, clean it up so that it outputs perfectly clean HTML in short order. It doesn't require any more discipline than taking a 30-minute-long tutorial. If a writer is too lazy to do that, then...well, what else can we expect as output? it will take them that long to learn and then remember to use Markdown, certainly.

Writers who don't use the built-in dropdown menus for setting headers and whatnot in Word end up causing a lot of trouble for themselves unless they pay for someone to fix all that stuff for them later. Other writers use the "nuclear method" *shudder* which destroys all existing formatting, and then restore the lost formatting manually as a final stage. I've been to conferences where people actually recommend doing this before submitting their book to self-publishing sites like Smashwords (where I work) and the KDP program.

The nuclear method is, with no offense to Coker, an abomination. There's no reason for it. Anyone with a competent understanding of Word can clean up a botched manuscript pretty quickly. Use two macros to preserve bold and italic formatting, set styles up, clear the rest of the styles, then lay down a base style, re-italicize the italics and re-bold the bold, and bob's yer uncle. The Smashwords "nuclear method" is for people with no patience nor aptitude for learning, as I'm sure you'd agree.

To me this seems like a waste of time. I understand that many writers tweak with style as a method of procrastination while writing, and that is why they can't switch software easily. I've suggested that this hypothetical "simple" editor have a copy of solitaire built-in, but it didn't go over very well.

I have exceedingly few writers who "tweak with style" as a method of procrastination. I've been successful in training some of them to use styles, not as some idiotic "make this look pretty" function, but to show them how incredibly useful, from a structural and creative standpoint, all that pesky stuff in the 'dropdown' menus really IS. The styles in the dropdown menus aren't merely text-formatting tools; they're CSS. They're structural, as well as formatting.

They enable users to use power features like Outline (incredibly valuable for long, complex documents with many levels); the Document map feature, and, as I've already stated, for creating a manuscript in which you can instantly change all the formatting for a given style with one click. You can display all the chapter heads at once, to see if you've misnumbered along the way; you can drag and drop sections or chapters around instantly...none of the silliness of trying to copy and paste inside the actual document. And it's absolutely irreplaceable for master documents and their sub-documents.

I personally write my books in markdown (very similar to plain text) using desktop software that looks like dillinger.io and convert to all the formats with pandoc, the tool that the OP mentioned. Asciidoc is also a good alternative. Markdown gives me the ability to add simple necessary markup like chapter headers, bold, italics, and quotes without dealing with the strict validation and distracting nature of (x)html. It is more than enough for people writing fiction novels. If you are writing programming textbooks you will probably want to go straight to html instead for more control over your markup, unless you have a good converter for code snippets and are happy with what it generates.

As I said: this is what works for you, and that's great. I personally get tired of having to use three (3!) different forms of Markdown every day; the Markdown in my CSR (Desk), the Markdown in Teamworks (my PM system), and the Markdown in Google+. Oh, yeah, and the Markdown in KDP Forums. So 4 different versions of it, every single day. Each one is different. That's annoying as hell. But to learn to do nothing but create bold, italics, headers, and quotes efficiently and competently in Word wouldn't take the averagely intelligent person more than half-an-hour, and it's far more forgiving when you want to make changes in many places at once. Just sayin'.

Edit:
Rather than using word tracker for keeping track of changes, I check all my books into git. You can see an example here. If I ever work with an editor, they can fork my repo and submit pull requests with changes. Probably out of reach for most people, but I dream of a future that a piece of software can be written to hide all the details so that your average author can use git for their book's change tracking too.

And, of course, lastly: for Track Changes, Markdown and Word simply cannot compare. For folks sending ms's out to editors or beta readers, Markdown really isn't going to work. Again, it suits you, and that's great...but it won't suit the average novelist or writer, not really. Not unless they have absolutely zero other people with input into their process.

Just my $.02. Obviously, you're happy with Markdown, and I know some other folks who are. But most writers are really not going to change their spots; they don't want to have to type all those extra keystrokes to bold a word, or italicize a sentence (I know it annoys me to have to switch back and forth between asterisks, underscores, etc., for italicization, not to mention the other formatting options). Not when they can double-click and either CTRL-letter or click an icon. As I stated, YMMV. ;-)

Hitch