Writing

Requirements

This article outlines my setup and workflow for writing documents using Markdown and pandoc. This is a workflow that I personally find natural and convenient. There are some very important limitations (discussed below), but I’ve been successfully using this workflow for quite some time and it seems to be working great.

Main requirements for my workflow were:

• plain text editing
• keeping track of multiple revisions
• collaboration with multiple simultaneous remote and offline authors
• support for multiple target output formats
• automated publishing (through an external build system and such)

Limitations

Note that publishing is a one-way process in this workflow. If you publish on a Wiki, then you’ll need to find a way to pull the changes from Wiki back into your “source” document. I’m using Git-MediaWiki bridge to publish/update articles to/from our corporate wiki. I’ve also looked into replacing MediaWiki with gitit which uses Git as a backend and therefore would have allowed me to push/pull to it directly, but presently the feature set is not complete enough to be a viable replacement.