I'm working on a content management system that needs to handle blog posts and articles, with the ability to output them in various formats—like e-books (PDF, .epub), HTML for the web, and print-ready PDFs. I'm looking for a universal and basic format that I can adapt for different use cases, including images. Right now, I'm considering using markdown since I can store it in the database, embed image links, and then format it into an HTML template. Plus, I could leverage pandoc to convert the HTML into epub and PDF, while using specific formatting for print. I'm curious if there are other formats that work well for this or if there's a commonly accepted solution in the community; how have others handled similar situations?
3 Answers
Markdown is the go-to choice nowadays, and for good reasons. It’s simple, widely known, and flexible enough for most uses. If you want simplicity combined with power, sticking with markdown would be a smart move.
Have you thought about using LaTeX? It's fantastic for book formatting, which is why so many scientific papers and theses are created with it. For simpler posts, markdown is great and very common. If you need advanced formatting, consider reStructuredText; it can handle more complex tables than markdown does.
LaTeX can definitely be more powerful than markdown, especially for documents requiring heavy formatting. Just make sure you check if its formatting survives when converting to epub and PDF, otherwise it might complicate things.
Good point! I’ll look into how that works during conversion. Thanks for the tip!