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PP - Generic preprocessor (with pandoc in mind) - macros, literate programming, diagrams, scripts... (by CDSoft)
Talking about the downsides of Markdown: it's not that you can't use Markdown without tables. Since there is not just one Markdown flavor, there are variants such as this one which do define table support and more. This introduces other difficulties to users of Markdown. For example, you need to know what kind of Markdown is supported with your current tool-set. In my business life, we do use a tool-chain to generate documents via Markdown, pandoc and pp (I'm not sure if the correct link is this or that). Using that, I may use even two different kinds of Markdown tables with different syntax and different features for formatting. I guess I don't need to explain much more on that to emphasize that this is a complicated thing to write and maintain since editing tools do not seem to support Markdown tables at all or they only support only one kind of Markdown table and not all of them. It's a big mess that the original authors or Markdown could not foresee and later, nobody could fix it so far although there is CommonMark which tried to fix it but it didn't stick much.
For example this https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-spec/wiki/markdown-flavors and for org is only one standard documented on https://orgmode.org/
Recently vim got a new package which try to implement org-mode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode.
Here is the source code for org-md-export https://gitlab.com/akater/org-mode/-/blob/org-element-cleaner-parsers/lisp/ox-md.el. It's not too long as far as transformation code goes (~750 loc), but also not the most trivial. Of note are the parts that require larger functions (and therefore more logic) which seem to be the parts relating to org's cross-linking structure (links, headlines and headline references, as well as list items). I would love for them to be unified, but I'm guessing there may be surprising difficulties, and I'm guessing the necessary, incompatible changes would be too much to stomach for so many long-time users.
That sounds cool. But again it seems like these are features of a tool rather than the core syntax that are giving you the benefits. Have you looked at obsidian? I'm not suggesting it's better or worse, but that the markdown syntax itself is kinda the side issue, compared to the tool features.
Talking about the downsides of Markdown: it's not that you can't use Markdown without tables. Since there is not just one Markdown flavor, there are variants such as this one which do define table support and more. This introduces other difficulties to users of Markdown. For example, you need to know what kind of Markdown is supported with your current tool-set. In my business life, we do use a tool-chain to generate documents via Markdown, pandoc and pp (I'm not sure if the correct link is this or that). Using that, I may use even two different kinds of Markdown tables with different syntax and different features for formatting. I guess I don't need to explain much more on that to emphasize that this is a complicated thing to write and maintain since editing tools do not seem to support Markdown tables at all or they only support only one kind of Markdown table and not all of them. It's a big mess that the original authors or Markdown could not foresee and later, nobody could fix it so far although there is CommonMark which tried to fix it but it didn't stick much.
Talking about the downsides of Markdown: it's not that you can't use Markdown without tables. Since there is not just one Markdown flavor, there are variants such as this one which do define table support and more. This introduces other difficulties to users of Markdown. For example, you need to know what kind of Markdown is supported with your current tool-set. In my business life, we do use a tool-chain to generate documents via Markdown, pandoc and pp (I'm not sure if the correct link is this or that). Using that, I may use even two different kinds of Markdown tables with different syntax and different features for formatting. I guess I don't need to explain much more on that to emphasize that this is a complicated thing to write and maintain since editing tools do not seem to support Markdown tables at all or they only support only one kind of Markdown table and not all of them. It's a big mess that the original authors or Markdown could not foresee and later, nobody could fix it so far although there is CommonMark which tried to fix it but it didn't stick much.
Talking about the downsides of Markdown: it's not that you can't use Markdown without tables. Since there is not just one Markdown flavor, there are variants such as this one which do define table support and more. This introduces other difficulties to users of Markdown. For example, you need to know what kind of Markdown is supported with your current tool-set. In my business life, we do use a tool-chain to generate documents via Markdown, pandoc and pp (I'm not sure if the correct link is this or that). Using that, I may use even two different kinds of Markdown tables with different syntax and different features for formatting. I guess I don't need to explain much more on that to emphasize that this is a complicated thing to write and maintain since editing tools do not seem to support Markdown tables at all or they only support only one kind of Markdown table and not all of them. It's a big mess that the original authors or Markdown could not foresee and later, nobody could fix it so far although there is CommonMark which tried to fix it but it didn't stick much.