• tux0r@snac.rosaelefanten.org
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • tux0r@snac.rosaelefanten.org
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        3 days ago

        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 ms macro, 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.

        • sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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          3 days ago

          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.