---
title: "Exploring Markdown in Collaborative Authoring to Publishing Workflows"
date: 2013-06-04
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/06/04/exploring-markdown-in-collaborative-authoring-to-publishing-workflows/
---
# Exploring Markdown in Collaborative Authoring to Publishing Workflows
When you're authoring content, you're usually in the figure-it-out mode. You add pieces here and there as you learn how a system works. You gather feedback from subject matter experts, who also add comments, delete or add content, and so forth as they review the content.

Sometimes the content originates from the subject matter expert and you're the one editing the content. Regardless, during this development phase, content is in a constant flux — increasing in words, decreasing in words, changing shape and form with each iteration. Sections get added and deleted. Steps are constantly altered, rearranged, inserted and reordered, and so on.

During content development, I need a format that's flexible and easy to work with. I also need the content on a web platform that's easy to share access so that I can collaborate with others.

I've found that [Google Docs](https://google.com/drive) works great for collaborative authoring. Subject matter experts can highlight a word and add comments in the sidebar. Their comments appear right next to the highlighted words. I can also reply to their comments or resolve them. Resolved comments are hidden in an archive that I can always open and view later. Subject matter experts also find no problem at all originating new content in Google Docs.

![I love how easy it is to carry on conversations about specific parts of the document in Google docs.](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/sampledoc-600x267.png)

Best of all, Google Docs is free. SMEs don't need to download special software or pay extra fees to access, write, and edit content.

Wikis are also good content development tools. Although sometimes adding comments in a system like Mediawiki isn't quite as intuitive (there's a separate tab on each page for comments), the wiki format has proven useful across the web for collaborative content needs of large-scale teams.

## The Problem

Here's the problem. When I'm done authoring the content, I want to port the content into another system for publishing. In my case, Drupal. Others have different publishing needs. Maybe you have a company website where the help material goes, or a help center portal, or some other platform. How do you get your content out of one system and into another, especially when that first system is the easygoing collaborative scratchpad that doesn't have a lot of structure to pull on intelligently?

If you try a copy-and-paste route with Google Docs, you end up with a ton of span tags and other inline formatting in your code. Every paragraph has a left-to-right class associated with it. The HTML export from Confluence can be problematic as well. It all depends just how much your authors have been using those rich text editor buttons. The more they use rich text editing, the worse the code looks.

**What I need is a universal format that allows content to be transported from one system to another without any reformatting.**

The need for porting content from one system to another was exactly why I was looking into DITA, because you can do this kind of system porting with DITA. But all the workflows seemed problematic. If I authored in an XML editor and output to HTML, and then copied and pasted the HTML output into Google Docs, I'd still be spending a lot of time tagging content, because the source in Google Docs would change as the content gets edited and updated by SMEs and other authors. I'd have to copy and paste the Google Doc content back into my XML editor and restructure everything with the right tags.

Vendor-provided collaborative platforms for structured content offer solutions to this problem but usually recreate the collaborative tools within their own system. And these online platforms aren't cheap, especially if you have a lot of users.

What I want is a lightweight system for porting content around. In my brief exploration into feasible and inexpensive methods, I stumbled across [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). Markdown is a shorthand syntax for HTML. It's pretty similar to Mediawiki syntax but simpler, and its main job is to transform the syntax to HTML.