Colophon

It's been interesting getting to grips with yet another markup language and protocol. Here I describe the workflow I have fallen into.

For short-form writing like these blog posts, writing directly in gemtext is fine. In fact, I just write Markdown and give it a quick once-over in a Gemini client to see if it looks ok (assumption is that readers figure out what *emphasis*, etc. means).

For longer documents, I start from (Github flavoured) Markdown. Then process this using

md2gemini

which even makes a fair fist of rendering tables, then scp to the server. This is all automated in a "push" Makefile rule.

The only

lowdown

feature I miss so far is bibliography management (lowdown had no problem with a pass-through to groff & refer). So I adopt a low-tech workaround, a "ms" document containing *only* references, which I copy-and-paste from to the Markdown file being written.

Your Mileage May Vary, but this works for me. I've been looking for a "Minimal Viable Documentation Workflow" for a while, this is a simplification of the lowdown & groff which I used previously.

Something I do need to work on is the document contents. I think published books (including ebooks) belong in a references list, as well as hyperlinked if available. However, just a hyperlink probably suffices for shorter Web pages.

Back to my gemlog