Writing a thesis using only markdown sounds extremely painful. Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images? How are you going to create your list of figures? And your table of contents? How are you going to create, maintain, and organize your list of references? I could go on.
Writing my thesis with markdown was one of the best decisions i made.
I wrote 99% of my master thesis in markdown (50 pages w/o interviews). 1) I didn't have a lot of images so i just wrote FIXME: Image Foo.png where they belonged. 2) I wrote my Citations Plain in there (e.g. Wocken, 1985, 7 ff.), using a special folder for all sources i really used in Mendeley. 3) Writing in markdown i could just c&p perfectly formatted chapters written with simplenote. 4) i also could seperate the chapters in files and keep everything in a git repo.
When i was finnished writing i exported the markdown to rtf, 1) selected all the h1's via "select all", set them to be a real (word) h1. vice versa with all other styles i used. 2) Then i put in all the pictures. 3) Then i exported the list from Mendeley.
That process - from markdown to perfection - took me less than 4 hours.
I have some experience with latex and especially latex + komascript, but i hated that experience because the latex sourcecode doesn't ebrace readability and you're sure to get obscure errors in the last second. besides stuff like running latex twice for a table of contents.
Writing
\begin{itemize}
\item really long line which gets wrangled in my vim
terminal, so that i don't see where the second item starts.
\item another long line. maybe 200 characters long?
\end{itemize}
is complicated and you can't read it well. this otoh is very easy to read:
* really long line which gets wrangled as well, but is
better to read because it starts with a clear sign which
is recognized to be a bullet.
* next line, which is also very long.
Easy readability is crucial, because i needed proof readers. The young proof readers could actually get the markdown code and correct my mistakes there (or write comments, starting with another fixme). really rocked with diff.
The older proofreaders could proofread it in the final stage in ms word with the track changes functionality.
I put a lot of thought into Design and Typography and i was sure that i could decide better how my document should look, than latex.
I agree, that for some people this is not the case.
Most content can be written in something other than LaTeX, especially in early drafts. I always start drafting papers in Markdown. I cannot imagine going from start to finish with Markdown though. Especially since most papers have fairly strict style guidelines and length restrictions.
How do you get pagination with markdown?
I would like to switch to markdown instead of using latex, because my needs are simple. But how can I convert markdown into something with support for pagination?
> Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images?
This is what most people do in physics and astronomy. You make the plot in some kind of plotting package and export it to a vector format. In astronomy, the journals only recently started accepting PDF figures in addition to EPS.
In my experience doing all of my figures in LaTeX is significantly more painful than using a real plotting package like matplotlib.
I wrote a dissertation, two theses, and a bunch of papers in latex and I never ever ever ever did any graphics that weren't imported as eps or, later, png.
I don't know your exact use cases but I am reallyfond of pgfplots which, being based on TikZ, integrates much better than matplotlib. But I also happen to hate matplotlib for sticking with "that" API ...
None of those features require LaTeX arcane syntax, obscure source code, and multiple compilation steps. reStructuredText is a Markdown-like language containing some of the features you mention, especially with extensions; its syntax is well-defined, and its main implementation is in Python.
The point isn't if Markdown has enough features, but rather that LaTeX lets you a pay a price for those features that you shouldn't be paying, just because it's a 40-years-old software.
