markdown, xml and lens

[Ian Mulvany]

Hi,

I noticed that the manual Michael has put together is generated out of
markdown using panodoc. Given the work that Rebecca has been doing to
go from lens -> NLMXML, does this mean we could get a markdown -> lens
-> NLM?

That could be useful for the scholarly markdown people:
http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/06/17/what-is-scholarly-markdown/

- Ian

[Michael Aufreiter]

Is there a working implementation for scholarly markdown already?

You should have a glance at the latest Pandoc release. 

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html

Pandoc markdown supports almost everything you need for a scientific paper, including citations, tables, formulas etc. With 1.12 (released yesterday) there's also metadata support in the form of a YAML front matter. Pretty neat stuff.

I think we could go easily from Pandoc markdown to Lens to NLM. Maybe that's a great option for paper submission. We could have a toolchain for authors that lets them write Pandoc markdown, preview in Lens (on the fly) and submit the markdown file (or converted NLM) to eLife for review.