I don’t know if a great online markdown editor yet exists. pubpub is sadly being shut down. I did use hedgedoc for accepting submissions for a small conference recently, it worked well although not sure it would scale to the needs of NIME.
It’s easy enough to have markdown compile to LaTeX and then use the NIME template from there. However then you lose the ability to publish the proceedings in accessible (i.e. non-pdf) form, with interactive figures.
It’s a pretty good idea, maybe a better idea than the Word template.
NIME has moved back to PDF from PubPub in the last few years, so in that sense we wouldn’t lose anything in interactivity.
Anything on proceedings format needs to be discussed at board level, but do you have a proof of concept showing how this can work with the NIME LaTeX template? I’m particularly interested in whether it can handle references properly.
That’s a great idea, we should definitely give it a try. Pandoc should be able to compile a PDF from a .bib + .md + .yaml files I guess, which should not overburden authors.
ICLC has supported academic markdown since its first edition in 2015. I chaired it that year, most people chose markdown over word, and there were no issues apart from from one person who used the template to generate TeX and then got in the weeds with that.
Here’s the most recent version of the templates:
I generated both HTML and PDF proceedings that year. I think since then paper chairs have only generated PDF but it worked well in 2015.
As an aside I had really good experience with Pretalx as a self-hosted conference manager for alpaca conference. The paper submission, review and scheduling process was honestly really amazing. If NIME is intending to use Microsoft CMT, note that some boycott Microsoft for being complicit in genocide.
It was a while ago but make.sh compiled it using a bibtex etc. I made a plugin for generating figures from haskell but as I remember the basics are straightforward, merging the NIME LaTeX template with the pandoc latex one.
It would be important to recommend recent versions of pandoc, as those that ship with e.g. debian can be on the old side with some incompatibilities.
