authored in Markdown
Why? A huge reason why I used groff for my resume was that roff already does support all markup I needed, including tables and colours. Markdown is a serious downgrade here.
Good question. I had an unreleased version of this project running on groff only for quite some time.
After using it for 25 or so applications, I got the feeling that having markdown as the “source of truth” was slightly easier for reading, checking, and diffing different versions. I’ve been using it with Markdown as a base and I’m happy with the results.
Basically, I found Groff’s syntax slightly “heavier” than Markdown for everyday visual use.
Having said that, I know that a lot of the visual clutter issues can be fixed on the groff side. If you actually have a groff resume format that is very readable for you, I would like to take a look and maybe reevaluate if i’m doing groff the right way.
I got the feeling that having markdown as the “source of truth” was slightly easier for reading, checking, and diffing different versions.
Hmm. With groff, diffing is notably easier in my experience, as (unlike Markdown) you usually have one command per line and very little (or none at all) inline markup, whereas you’d have to count asterisks when diffing Markdown…
If you actually have a groff resume format that is very readable for you, I would like to take a look and maybe reevaluate if i’m doing groff the right way.
I actually do, but it was my first serious .roff file, so I don’t think it would be a good inspiration for you :)
edit: Oh, it seems that Lemmy won’t pick up my comment deletions here. Sorry for the double reply.
Makes sense, thanks for the reply. You have a point about “diff by line”, and I might have not gone all in on serious roff to land on all the benefits.
Another thing I see as an example of markdown being slightly more readable: Unlike roff, not needing to escape some typographical marks (like - to get a hyphen). And the better syntax highlighting support for stuff like bold, italics, and so on in Markdown.
Bold, italics and other text decorations are supported in roff just well. I agree that there is a readability advantage of
This is an example text with three italic words
over
This is an example text with
.I three italic words(using the
msmacro, of course), but I’d argue that the additional complexity of throwing more markup languages on it when you already use roff anyway is not really worth it. YMMV, of course.Good point about style; I was thinking more about
\f[I]than.I. So yeah, I see that if you have every semantic thing on its own line, diffing and maybe readability is better.
deleted by creator
I got the feeling that having markdown as the “source of truth” was slightly easier for reading, checking, and diffing different versions.
Hmm. With groff, diffing is notably easier in my experience, as (unlike Markdown) you usually have one command per line and very little (or none at all) inline markup, whereas you’d have to count asterisks when diffing Markdown…
If you actually have a groff resume format that is very readable for you, I would like to take a look and maybe reevaluate if i’m doing groff the right way.
I actually do, but it was my first serious .roff file, so I don’t think it would be a good inspiration for you :)
