Now. Why am I wrong for Libre
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown.
The thing I really hate about modern word processors and everyone's obsession with PDFs is that the vast majority of the time things will never be printed, but everything still focuses on paginated formats. Nobody seems to get this but you can literally send someone a .HTML file that they can just open in their browsers. Even when I tell developers about this they say dumb things like a single file will load slower. Buddy, it's loading from the disk, it's not querying shit, it is okay to make it a single HTML file.
But no, fuck you, just pages and PDFs.
The silver lining is that at least Google Docs (I don't use other editors often) now has a "pageless" mode. But the amount of times I've run into weird things like accidentally backspacing the last character of something with special formatting only to undo it, add extra characters temporarily, then backspace in front of it... Fucking hell. Just let me write Markdown. Just let me write Markdown! JUST LET ME WRITE MARKDOWN!
Paginated formats still have advantages even if they are never printed. It just makes referencing stuff so much easier, if you can say "page 451, second headline, third paragraph".
Even easier, for a markdown (text) file, you could just tell someone the line to go to.
If people used markdown instead, then everyone would have nice text editors installed which would make this easy.
Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).
If stuff like this was adopted, integrations could be very nice (with easier solutions than saying "go to x page and look for x header", I could even imagine links being a thing assuming this feature is developed).
Why don't you just ctrl+f in a word doc/PDF? That's still possible, but it's not exactly of much help in many cases. E.g. if the headline you are looking for is the name of a basic concept that appears all over in the document. Page 512 only appears once.
All other forms of indexing are content-dependant. Indexing by page works the same on any page-based document.
You can of course, but I was specifically pointing out how slow word is when doing any search query.
Page 512 or line 10054, more or less the same thing right?
Didn't think about duplicate header names, in those cases I guess you would need to be given a line number to go to if someone's sharing a section for you to see.
I don't use word collaboratively that heavily so maybe people telling you to "see page 512" is common and I can see how saying "go to line 100512" is harder. I'm sure nothing would stop editors from introducing a feature for fake page numbers.
There will always be certain drawbacks though, most may be fixed by editors having nice UX, others maybe not.
A good example for what I mean with the header names is e.g. the datasheet of a microcontroller. For e.g. the Atmega328p, that's a PDF with a few hundred pages.
If you search for a section explaining a feature, and you CTRL+F for the name of the feature, which is the headline of the corresponding section, you will get matches for the same exact string of characters all over the document: first in the feature list in the beginning of the document, then on the pinout, then in the text of any other feature that references the feature you are looking for, then in the appendices and lastly in the glossary. Somewhere in the middle of these potentially 100s of matches will be the correct one.
After a while of using that document, you will have the most important page numbers memorized.
If it's a headline, you'll find it in the index, from where you can jump to the right page.
Yes, if you have pagination.
But how are you going to package it as part of a subscription and make billions off that idea? You need to go back to capitalism school!
Hehe i'll start a company that charges you 30/month/user for markdown tech tips.
Then i'll make my own markdown editor that adds proprietary non-standard features to lock you into my ecosystem.
Nahhhh, you gotta think outside the box. You can tell people section 3, subsection 2, etc. even without pages. I'm addition, check this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#Anchor Click that. See the little but at the end?
#Anchor? We can already use URI fragments to link to specific sections."But JackbyDev, I'm not linking to a specific section of something in an outline, I need to link to a specific part of long form content, like a novel. I can only do that with pages."
That's a good point, but modern browsers have a way to deal with that too. This is where text fragments help: they allow the link author to have full control over what text to link to, without requiring any special markup in the target document. You can use
#:~:text=to link to specific blocks of text.~~Edit: Lemmy is reformatting that for some reason and makes it not work. Try copying and pasting the below for a working example.~~
~~
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#%3A%7E%3Atext=This+is+where+text+fragments+help%3A+they+allow+the+link+author+to+have+full+control+over+what+text+to+link+to%2C+without+requiring+any+special+markup+in+the+target+document.~~Edit 2: Apparently Lemmy reformats links in preformat snips. Amazing. Maybe slap this into the URL bar
en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#:~:text=This%20is%20where%20text%20fragments%20help%3A%20they%20allow%20the%20link%20author%20to%20have%20full%20control%20over%20what%20text%20to%20link%20to%2C%20without%20requiring%20any%20special%20markup%20in%20the%20target%20document.after pastinghttps://developer.mozilla.org/Nothing more frustrating that trying to show people a very cool and useful feature of browsers only for a different tool to just ruin it.I think you just proved my point.
None of that is nearly as simple and accessible to non-techy people as page numbers. A page number would also not have been scrabled by Lemmy.
(I of course do know about link anchors and all that, but it's just a hassle to use.)
No, that's a Lemmy bug. If it's screwing up URLs like that it could affect other URLs too. Not a bug of text fragments. Text fragments are still relatively new. Firefox only began supporting them last year. Annoyingly, to create then in Firefox you still need to go into
about:configor use an extension. But still, the idea that we should favor paginated format just because you can say "page blah" when we have better ways is foolish. Saying "Search for the phrase 'blah blah blah'" works equally well without text fragments.And yes, it's annoying that anchor links are too difficult to link to. But again, the idea that we should accept all the baggage of paginated formats just because anchors tend to be done incorrectly is foolish as well.
The point was that text fragments, link fragments and even "search for the phrase X" are things that are brittle and require software support that's not necessarily a given. Having to enable experimental features of adding extensions are far too much hassle for the average user.
I honestly don't see what "baggage" paginated formats have. If you don't like pagination, turn it off in your PDF viewer. That's much easier to do than to get all software in your tool chain to work correctly with text fragments.
This is a pretty foolish statement. It's totally immaterial "who" is at fault if the feature doesn't work. You did not manage to send a working text fragment over Lemmy. Doesn't matter what in the chain screwed up.
I can tell you the page to turn to via a phone call or even in person. Try sending a text fragment by telling it to someone. Text fragments are a nice little feature but far too technical to adequately replace pagination in all circumstances.
How often are you in the scenario that you you're on a phone call and need to tell someone where something is in a document versus communicating with them online where you can send a link though? Every work meeting I've been in for the past nearly a decade now has been through something like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc. where I can send text.
Also PDF viewers are the baggage in the scenario. Everyone uses web browsers everyday. PDF viewers are the odd one out in the majority of people's "tool chains".
Obsidian. Great notes app with a ton of features and is free. ~~Open source too, I think,~~ but could be wrong on that. I usually am. But it's all in markdown baby! I use it for my dnd world and notes.
Unless they've open-sourced it in the last year or so, Obsidian isn't open source. That being said, it does have big vibes of open source. Like, there's more to open source than simply the source code being available — it's also about the general ethos of openness. When I was using Obsidian, I felt reassured that my notes were my own, and they would still function mostly the same if Obsidian went under. It's a big part of why I switched to it from Notion
Obsidian is an org-mode/org-roam wannabe
Yeah, but getting into org-mode low key feels like the tinkering equivalent of starting a heroin habit. I say this as someone who basically lives in org-mode nowadays. I am the weird kind of person who relishes the learning curve, and for me, getting to tinker with my tools helps keep me motivated to actually use my note taking systems. I think that people like me are outliers though.
That is to say that I don't think "wannabe" is the right word, because Obsidian isn't trying to be org-mode. I'd maybe call it "org-mode lite", because of how it takes some of those features and repackages them to be more accessible to a wider audience. I don't think that's a bad thing though — indeed, Obsidian was my gateway drug to where I am now
I just wish that obsidian would let me self host a server with their software.
What do you mean by this, an obsidian web client that access a local store? They don't make that. That's not "their software". You could set up a vm to remote into, with obsidian installed/running.
Synchronization can be achieved via many other mechanisms also.
Obsidian is nearly perfect. My biggest gripe is the link format it uses, even when using Markdown style, doesn't use the full relative path to files, just the name of the file. So you can't click them in say, VS Codium and have them work.
My perfect tool would be something like Obsidian but uses the GitHub Pages approach while not being tied to GitHub. (The GitHub Pages gem fails in a few ways if the repository doesn't have a GitHub remote.)
Love obsidian.
Counterpoint: LaTeX
If LaTeX is being used to produce paginated output for people to view that will exclusively never be printing it then I have a lot of the same gripes. Though any sort of non-WYSIWYG format is more enjoyable in my mind.
I must be the odd one. I find PDFs easy to use, convenient, easy to edit, and manageable. The business world relies quite a bit on PDF. The whole point of PDFs is that they can easily be printed, signed, be fillable forms, or stored as a single file where the size can be adjusted to fit storage requirements. The only issue I have with them is so many editors all want money for the ability to edit them whereas other document formats have software like LibreOffice that are free. I get you’re probably good at markdown, but the rest of the business world that relies on PDFs and can barely handle them or open a web browser. Their brains would melt if they couldn’t simply open or print a single file.
Alternatively, if the business world can already handle PDF, then they can surely handle markdown. They're already easy to open, and just like a PDF is easy (???) to edit as long as you have the right software, Markdown's easy to get predictable printing out of even with the right* software. I think the PDFs are probably slightly easier for forms, but that's about it. Everything else is just a matter of familiarity, and imo, it's easier to get familiar with Markdown.
*If this somehow doesn't work out, they could surely make do with a standard print preview.
Are you an accessibility remediator? I feel like they are the ones who like PDFs the most.
No. I simply find them easy to use. Maybe it’s because familiarity, but I see nothing inherently difficult with saving a document as PDF, and making them form-fills with the right software isn’t too hard. When someone is sent a contract or something they tend to be used to looking at what they would see on paper, PDFs tend to be what they’re used to and very basic WYSIWYG, so people don’t have to think too hard about it.
You find PDFs easy to edit? Also, there's no reason why you can't make a single HTML file the way you make a single PDF file. It's not done in the web for organization and optimization reasons, but it's still possible.
Also, what do you mean about resizable? Open a web browser, adjust the width. Look at the text. Watch as it moves. Do that with a PDF, absolutely not the same. PDFs have a static size.
Form filling with HTML is easy too. https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp
Resizable as in file size. PDF quality is easily adjustable when saved.
You may want to check out Typora.