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Visually pleasing posts: How to improve your Markdown writing on SN

4616 sats \ 40 comments \ @Design_r 17 Mar Design

First thing first... as per my nym, I'm a designer, and am here like you to take the opportunity to improve my writing skills.

This isn't either another explanatory article on what's the syntax and how to use it. For that you can click on the [M↓] icon in the top-right of the editor when writing. Not everyone know what markdown is, but we all know the basics of formatting text with bold, italics and other artifacts to improve the readability of the knowledge we aim to share.

I felt there's a general lack on this regard here on SN. Just wanted to provide some guidance on how to improve quality of your writing skills, with time, patience and maybe using some tools that allow you to save the copy, rest and return reading it with a fresh mind before publishing it.

From my experience, it has been really useful to prepare the posts offline, read them edit when needed and when possible have someone else to share it with before posting it here.

To do that tried multiple tools, obviously open source and below you can find some of the best I was able to select:

Zettlr ALL OSs Your one-stop publication workbench. From idea to publication in one app: it accompanies you while writing your blog post, newspaper article, term paper, thesis, or entire book!

Ghostwriter ALL OSs Enjoy a distraction-free writing experience, including a full screen mode and a clean interface. With Markdown, you can write now, and format later.

Marktext ALL OSs A simple and elegant markdown editor that focus on speed and usability. It also has Formula and Diagrams support, unfortunately not yet supported here on SN.

Rentry ONLINE Fast, simple and free. A markdown paste service with preview, custom urls and editing. Nice but it has some limits like 200k characters for text field, 2-100 characters for custom url field (must contain only latin letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens) and 1-100 characters for custom edit code field (anything is allowed here).

Stackedit ONLINE The in-browser Markdown editor, offers an unrivalled writing experience enhanced by WYSIWYG controls, Smart layout, Live preview with Scroll Sync and ideal collaboration functionality that allows you to insert inline comments and embed collaborator discussions in your files, just as well as famous ones does.

MacDown MAC only When current available Markdown editors are almost all for general writers, MacDown is different: It's for creative developers. Syntax highlighting, live preview, sync scroll, fullscreen mode, auto save, powerful actions, auto pair, custom themes and CSS, HTML and PDF export, enhanced CJK support. I know, it's exactly the app you want.

Retext LINUX only A simple but powerful editor for Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages. One can also add support for custom markups using Python modules. Just like that!

It is really easy to get caught by our emotions and start ranting down anything that pass through our mind... it's also a really hard process! We think at a speed that our body can not replicate and most of our thoughts get lost during the writing process, fixing typos and rephrasing, we lose sometime the thread of what we wanted to communicate.

All of us think and speak faster than we can write, and when we are thinking and writing, guess what we’re concentrating on? One strategy is to learn a little shorthand or condensed writing that you'll expand on when reading back to edit and improve it. Another to improve your WPM (word per minute) skills with tools like typingbolt and keybr or testing your current speed and might also get a certificate!

Other tools that you could use if you are a good speaker is to try a speech-to-text software. I'll leave that for another post! Hope you find this useful, and please, feel free to share tour tips and tricks below so we can all learn from each other experience.

Uh, and don't forget the keyboard shortcuts like ctr+b for bold text, ctr+i for italic and ctr+k for inserting a link.

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1 reply \ @didiplaywell 24 May

@Design_r hopefully you will read this. I loved Marktext but stooped using it upon painfully finding that it has a dangerous bug in which it randomly deletes the files it opens, or regresses it to previous versions when you close the program, no matter how many times you save. It had the exact same problem on two different computers, in two different OS (linux and windows). That was last year, and so far I checked github it's still untackled. Against my dearest principles, I had to settle with obsidian, and could not lock back since.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 24 May

Thanks for reporting this bug, I've to admit it has been long time since I used last time and always used only on mac OS.

144 sats \ 7 replies \ @Atreus 17 Mar

The first layer of communication is mere grammar. We're all able to do this with a minimum education.

The second layer of communication is *logic... not all of us can do this. It requires formulating a cohesive argument and following it through, from A to B. But I think most of us working in this space can do this.

But the third layer of communication is where almost everyone drops the ball, and that's rhetoric. This is where you package 🎁 the message for delivery; it's a grammatical, logical, poetic, and visual. 👁️ Design enters at this layer, in the form of wording, formatting, and even imagery. If this were about music, the third layer sets the tone of the instrument 🎺 we want to play.

And quite honestly, this 👆 is hard work. No matter how good your message is, it can be lost in translation without the right packaging.

The TLDR is: Yes I agree, formatting matters. 🫡

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

So beautifully packed! Thanks, I never thought it that way... Layers of communication! Damn man, you got the point of writing! Also @DarthCoin mentioned some of these point in #469063

Do you have any resources or learning material to share about it? I was focusing on formatting but am happy to bring this thread a bit forward

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @arrivederci 18 Mar

What's your thinking on exclamation and question marks immediately after an italicised word ?

I note that you didn't italicise the exclamation mark after packed above. The run on to the exclamation mark looks a little clumsy to me, but the alternative of also italicising the exclamation mark also looks a little weird.

(My own solution is to adopt the French practice of leaving a space before exclamation & question marks. Which I find more appealing anyway, in general use.)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 18 Mar

Not all cases are the same and your approach on creating a space it probably work on all cases, same as it would without but... as you said, adding a French touch might be perceived as a nice detail and a more pleasurable reading.

From my perspective, it also depends on which letter is last near the exclamation point: it does change, having a i! that compensate or a v! that push it forward. The type of font used also make a huge difference. So I'd personally not use the same approach all the times.

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @arrivederci 18 Mar

@Atreus is referencing the Trivium here

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Atreus 18 Mar

Found the man of culture 🍺

31 sats \ 1 reply \ @arrivederci 18 Mar freebie

Perhaps, perhaps not. It was a little embarrassing for me to look at that article because it reminded me that I have Marshall McLuhan's doctoral dissertation on the Trivium¹ in book form, and still haven't got around to reading it after quite a few years.

McLuhan, Marshall (2006). The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time ↩

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 18 Mar freebie

Thanks for sharing @Atreus' source. I'll definitely get that book on my hands

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @plebpoet 17 Mar

good points, good motivation to improve these skills. Thanks for sharing

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

Thank you!

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @carlosfandango 17 Mar

Thank you for these suggestions!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

You welcome! Hope are useful

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Coinsreporter 17 Mar

Have a look at this #467711 post and simply do what @runningbitcoin does to make his posts look awesome.

And learn how to do all those things from 'markdown'

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @runningbitcoin 18 Mar

🙏

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 17 Mar

Great piece. I also find prepping long posts in an editor to be much easier.

One more editor to add: Textmate, which is a FOSS text editor for the Mac (which also handles a much of non-Markdown text editing). It's not hyper-fancy, but it's been my go-to for a lot of text tools (HTML, CSS, some code) long before I started working with Markdown.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

That's great! Thanks for sharing, I totally missed this, it looks pretty awesome too

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 24 Sep

Tables alignement

| Left-aligned | Center-aligned | Right-aligned |
| :---         |     :---:      |          ---: |

credits: @0xbitcoiner on #698471

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @expatriotic 18 Mar

I use MacDown, unfortunately it can render HTML and SN cannot though. I use it for my blog

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @arrivederci 18 Mar

Markdown isn't really that hard to master. And SN is great in that it gives you a preview tab to check yr formatting before posting. (Not to mention a 10 minute editing window to further catch mistakes.)

I can appreciate using one of these (admirably FOSS) tools to craft a longer post but for short to medium replies (up to say 10 paras) I personally wouldn't bother (been using markdown for 15+ years, totally comfortable with it).

And btw, why bother with

ctr+i for italic

when straight markdown is just *italics* for italics ?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Design_r OP 18 Mar

why bother with ctr+i for italic

II like shortcuts, and it speeds up the writing, here in SN it creates the two _ and place the cursor between for you. Same for bold and links. Did you try?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @arrivederci 18 Mar freebie

(Warning : Super pedantic response on a completely trivial matter)

Ok, I've just tried it and I don't like it. I don't see how it's a shortcut when it still requires two inputs, the CTRL + i to initiate and then the necessary use of a cursor key to move over the trailing underscore. My way is just two inputs too - two asterisks (I use asterisks, you can also use underscores) that are typed in order, so no funny cursor movement.

And the point of Markdown is that it's intuitive - markdown is meant to look like 'marked up' text. Putting stars around a word clearly indicates some sort of emphasis. That's easy for someone from any culture to grasp. Italics is cursivo in Spanish and 斜体の in Japanese. If they don't know English (and why should they have to?) then it doesn't make any intuitive sense to them for why they're using (and having to remember) the first letter of a word they don't know in a key sequence to emphasise a word. Imagine explaining CTRL + i to a class of Swahili speaking kids, rather than just showing them how to directly put stars (or underscores) around a word for emphasis.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlokchainB 17 Mar

Thanks for the tips

I always want to use markdown when writing on here but always forget the syntax. Thanks to you I finally noticed the quick markdown button

now I can use stacker news much better

thanks

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 18 Mar

I'm glad it helped :) The syntax is really simple and when you get used to it, it's really about a hand of symbols you need to remember.

I also like to play with it for example a bold italic could be achieved like **_this_** or _**this**_ or even ***this*** !

One of the struggles I've here in Sn is to make an image clickable, apparently not doable due to the JS managing the images' preview. Not a big deal anyway, and probably safer this way.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @nout 17 Mar

From the app list I'm surprised you haven't mentioned Obsidian. Forget the "personal knowledge management" stuff, the graph visualization is a gimmick, but Obsidian is imo the best markdown editor. There's now also obsidian plugin to publish on nostr.

Fwiw I put shortcuts tutorial here #195621

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

Obsidian

I know it's a great tool. For my understanding, is not FOSS and that's why I did not include it

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 17 Mar

Yeah, that's fair, it's not FOSS. Obsidian has paid services and that's how they make money (i.e. that's what the product is. They don't have your files, they don't know who you are, they don't have your email if used without services and it's not a social network - so you are not really the product in this case). The free version is marketing to get people buy the paid one, but there's no vendor lock in.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

I fully understand, and thanks for sharing these important details. I truly believe there's value in sharing the source code and not make it proprietary IP of a fiat business. But that's the world we live in, I look forward to seeing how it will evolve.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 17 Mar

Great post!

I use VSCode to do my markdown authoring. Really I use it for the vast majority of my text editing needs.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

Yeah VScode is a great coding tool. I tried to keep the focus on writing tools instead fo coding. The great feature that many of these have is the preview that it is really helpful to spot inconsistencies and mistakes.

Does it have a preview mode too?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 17 Mar

Makes sense! Yes it does, though it’s probably not as good as dedicated writing tools, if I had to guess

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

Indeed, it is the best coding tool I know. I use it too :)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ch0k1 17 Mar

Haven't seen many of those so thank you for sharing them 🙏

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

🫶

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @DarthCoin 17 Mar

Good one. I like 3x more posts that are well formatted. Is more pleasant for the eye to read a well formatted story. You could pay more attention to the message instead of trying to follow the phrases.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

Thanks Dartcoin, appreciate you stopping here. You right, most of the time we keep following the phrases that brings the content to other directions.

What's the strategy you used to writing those so-useful guides? How do you plan them?

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 17 Mar

How do you plan them?

I usually, listen what others are asking online and IRL. If I am in a chat group, I pay attention to what people are asking, what problems they have, what they are looking for as solutions using Bitcoin in their day to day activity.

So I take notes, I use notepad++ because I can convert it easily into a markdown or even html. Just bulk notes, by category.

Then when I have time and I am bored, I come back to my notes and start testing a scenario based on what those people were asking for help. I try to put myself in their situation, with their level of knowledge, infrastructure, and use profile. I have to see what they see, otherwise the scenario tested is useless and will not find the right audience.

During the testing scenario I improve the original notes with the steps I did, to remember what I did, screenshots or schemes if are needed. I also try to find tricks to make it even easier to use that specific app. Sometimes developers do not explain in the documentation too much about their apps, so we need to squeeze everything from them.

Once the notes are ready and get a form of a guide, I format it a bit, insert some images, to make it more colorful and funny. I notice that if I do not insert some images, people tend to not read that guides or just frugal reading.

Chapters are very important too. Because you can link them into a specific discussion and point to the reader the exact position in the guide.

I like to use the bullets because it looks organized and easy to read, when you are trying to list some features or important points. Bullets are easy to remember.

So in general this is my strategy. The writing is exactly how is coming into my mind, I do not select my words very carefully, I don't care too much. I also have a lot of grammatical errors, I know it very well, but that is my "personal signature", I am human writing, not a stupid shatGPT.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Design_r OP 17 Mar

notepad++

Thanks for mentioning Notepad++ another really simple, flexible legendary one I could have add.

Your tricks are like gold! Thanks for sharing

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @1071a93267 21 Jul freebie

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Footnotes

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