OK, so, this is only tangential to the purpose of this community, but still. The concept of a PKMS has tossed me into a wider interest in storing the content of a document entirely in plaintext with nothing but a markup language, and then formatting that content from there (often with PanDoc). Nothing frustrates me more lately than the idea of stuff that could be in text files yet isn’t, because text files are rad as hell and computers actually understand them.
Confession: It’s a TTRPG rulebook because of course it’s a TTRPG rulebook. Of course the traditional method of making something that that is, y’know, Adobe Acrobat, but starting with something like that means that converting to any other format is just harder than it needs to be.
Obviously a PKMS like Obsidian isn’t really suited for longform, heavily hierarchical content like this. You used to be able to use nested YAML to hack a chapter / subchapter system together but no longer, and it was never a very good idea- if anything Obsidian intentionally resists attempts at hierarchy. LaTeX is awesome but none of the people who use LaTeX know how to document / tutorialize it in a sane way and it’s community consists entirely of mathematicians and technical writers. Seems like an astoundingly useful tool that goes woefully under-utilized.
My idea right now is to try using the DocUtils. It’s markup language ReStructure is explicitly hierarchical and, bonus points, ReStructure is used by Project Gutenberg for it’s epub tools.
Any other ideas? Am I being a bit of an idiot?
Edit:
I got what I was looking for. It’s AsciiDoc. Kind of a holy grail tech thing for me.
- within documents, there’s been a long standing series of arguments dealing with separating presentation from semantic – one of the reasons we’ve been through so many variations of HTML
- agreed, PDF should only be an output format, never a writing format
- on Youtube, Josh Plunkett and Nicole van der Hoeven are big advocates of using Obsidian for TTRPGs
- re: Obsidian and longform – there’s no necessity for keeping your document in one monolithic file – keeping things separated in conceptual chunks allows you to rearrange things as you work through ideas – you can use Pandoc to stitch everything together on top of handling conversion
- there are multiple text markup formats – Markdown has roughly won out, not because of any benefits, but just simply by being ubiquitous – it’s this generation’s equivalent of BBCode
- and again, Pandoc handles Markdown really well and integrates cleanly with Zotero (and BibTeX and CSL)
Useless trivia corner: before they switched to XML, Microsoft Word files were binary blobs that included everything past the end-of-file marker up to the end of the disk sector – a few people got burned because someone looked through hexdumps of their Word files and something important was buried in the general disk background noise
Yeah, this is a pretty good overview of the situation as it stands now.
BUT somehow I think I found a solution for myself in the hour since I posted it, AsciiDoc seems rad as hell. Very Markdown-like but geared more towards document writing and conversion to other “publishable” formats with features like automatic ToCs, citations, character conversion to more “literary” equivalents like emdash and more proper quotation marks, etc., just more complete in general where Markdown is for quick n’ dirty comments and forum posts. I’m super glad that I found it. Apparently some O’Riley books were written in it.
AsciiDoc does indeed look rad as hell, thanks for bringing it to my attention! I’m going to take a look into it :)
As for your original question though, I would just abuse headings and heading sizes. I’d use the biggest heading size for chapters, the next one down for subchapters, etc. I got this idea from Google Docs, as headings are what it pulls from when you ask it to make a table of contents. I don’t think Obsidian will do that, but I’ve never tried to use Obsidian to outline anything so it’s entirely possible Obsidian would do something similar for you.
Oh, that’s totally what I’ve been doing, but since Obsidian is Markdown-based you can only do so much with it. I could definitely use Google Docs to do something similar, but like I said in this post I’d like to have it all written out in a plaintext file because then, I could turn it into other stuff like a PDF, an EPUB, even a simple website without too much trouble.
Saw today that Obsidian has a plugin for TTRPG writing. I guess if I wanted to do Chapters and Subchapters myself I’d make a table of contents page and navigate from there to all the other pages using backlinks. LaTeX you are so right but because of that I just use templates. Your idea sounds awesome too, I wanna check that out.