How does Markdown compare to LaTex? I wrote in LaTex most of my career and only the past 10 years with Word. I generally liked LaTex, except I didn't like the fact that the doc I edited was not the doc distributed (dvi, pdf, ps). But its hard to beat the typesetting in LaTex.
Oddly, I find PowerPoint to be a great app. In fact, if I need to quickly draw something, I'm more likely to do it in PowerPoint than Illustrator or Design or anything. Why do standard drawing programs suck so much at doing quick sketches (at least for people like me who can't draw)?
Markdown compiles to a subset of HTML, whereas LaTeX is able to express pretty much anything that can possibly be put in pages of PDF.
As such, Markdown is very clean and focused. You can figure out all features of Markdown in a few minutes. As you know, LaTeX can be excruciatingly complex but astonishingly powerful
Markdown focuses on getting anything that isn't content out of the way. LaTeX defines it, rather explicitly.
I use both. I used to use LaTeX for everything, but I realized I didn't really need the power. Now I use Markdown, and have a custom style sheet for the html it creates (for printing, using the awesome Marked.app).
If you use pandoc to convert your markdown to tex, it will pass through any TeX commands embedded in the document, so you can get the best of both worlds.
In my experience, Markdown is easier for just words and for things eventually going online. But as soon as I need tables, references, non-trivial layout and especially equations, I pull out LaTeX.
Oddly, I find PowerPoint to be a great app. In fact, if I need to quickly draw something, I'm more likely to do it in PowerPoint than Illustrator or Design or anything. Why do standard drawing programs suck so much at doing quick sketches (at least for people like me who can't draw)?