It&#x27;s great to see others in the publishing world moving away from proprietary software like Word and towards plain-text based processes. As the author points out there are many benefits of this.<p>Here&#x27;s something to consider: you&#x27;ve ditched MS Word, maybe you can ditch InDesign too? In my experience once content goes into an Adobe program, it&#x27;s hard to get it out again in a clean way. It&#x27;s pretty impressive what you can accomplish using CSS3 for print layout[1].<p>I work at an academic publisher, and I&#x27;ve spent much of the last year preaching the benefits of a similar workflow. Some of the editors are now editing manuscripts in Markdown files directly. Currently we&#x27;re building a system where a single set of text files get fed into a program like a static website generator. This produces a web version, but also PDF, ePUB, etc. automatically. We&#x27;re getting pretty close[2]. I think this is the future for many forms of publishing.<p>I think one of the big remaining pieces of the puzzle is creating a better Markdown editor, something suited for the needs of scholars &amp; academics with support for things like footnotes, bibliographies, etc, while remaining a plain-text format.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alistapart.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;building-books-with-css3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alistapart.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;building-books-with-css3</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;egardner.github.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2015&#x2F;building-books-with-middleman&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;egardner.github.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2015&#x2F;building-books-with-mid...</a>