Is Markdown, Metanorma, Asciidoctor good for writing a graduation thesis?
Channel: LernenInVerschiedenenFormen
Date: 2019-12-29

My experience of tryint to use Markdown, Asciidoctor and metanorma for my graduation thesis. 

Result:
I cannot recommend you using any of those, if you need to output in PDF format. 

Asciidoctor works ok for HTML output.


Biggest problems:
- Markdown: simply offers too less features (no cross-referencing, no table of content, no numbered headings)



- Asciidoctor-pdf might have problems rendering, does not show Japanese Characters by default, is not included in asciidoctor (so it's harder to install), does not take given stylesheets into account (separate styling for HTML and PDF necessary) → It's not a "focus on the content"


- Metanorma: Getting a grasp of it from the website information is fairly difficult. Needs docker. I could not output a pdf; the converter stopped with an error for a correct file.


- Latex: No built-in support for UTF-8 (in my case: no Japanese characters). You need to search long and test-install a lot to find the right configuration (Feels like Lego-blocking). The document is too syntax-intensive. 



- Word / Writer / WPS / Onlyoffice : Their usage is not interchangable. A Word doc will not render the same on the others. Each of them has their own specific short-commings and bugs, which are hard to deal with, if you need to use various.



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