Katie and David tackle the use of Markdown and MultiMarkdown to write for the Web and more. This episode also includes an interview with Fletcher Penney, author of MultiMarkdown.
Links of note
Markdown
David’s MultiMarkdown and TextExpander Post
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Errata:
Gang,
I was a little sloppy with keyboard references. Sorry.
-D
/ — “Slash”
\ — “Backward Slash”
> — “Right Bracket”
^ — “Caret” or “Hat”
` – “Grave Accent”
Also, “LaTeX” should have been pronounced Lay-tech.
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One minor quibble, the characters after http: in web addresses are slashes, not backslashes. THIS “\” is a backslash, and they aren’t used in web addresses, mostly in Unix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash
For Markdown on the iPad then you should look at Edito which is a simple application designed for markdown.
Like in Simple Note you just write in your text but the advantage with Edito is the extra row of keys you get on the keyboard. Instead of having to use loads of clicks to get the symbol you want like the hash symbol #, the asterisk * etc you can do it with one click.
Easy….
You can export out as a text in an email or as html in an email
or as a file – either text or html as an attachment to an email.
The author of the app also has some CSS which you can see the effect of in the app or download to use with your created works when you have them to use outside of Edito.
Edito also has a cheatsheet included so you can remind yourself of the markdown code.
There is another similar app that will do the same but send to email only.
All the best
David Allen
Mac20Q Podcast
It’s pronounced Lay-tech or lah-tech, not latex. The x is supposed to be a greek chi.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Your overview and brief explanation of MultiMarkdown has taken me from knowing next to nothing about it to being able to “format” my text in plain text files ready for use on my blog. Now I can really settle down to working on the iPad
Just a quick non-helpful/useful note to say how much I enjoyed this episode. I hear John Gruber and, especially, Merlin Mann talking about it on podcasts and I finally have a clue what it is and what it’s useful for. I’ll certainly give it a try.
Great show…. I have not tried the application yet, but looking forward to giving it a shot and seeing what it can do for me. Thanks,
Thanks for your programs! The only issue here is, to a non-tech as me, how to effectively write in Markdown (the process) and then transfer to word… it is writting it (I tried using TextWrangler but I can not install daringfireball “pl” file ¿?¿? any help out there?) in a program and then saving it as TXT? then, how I manage to make it understable by word???
Thanks.
Enjoyed the show on Markdown. I use [Notational Velocity][1] for Mac which is free and open. There’s a special build of [NV that incorporates Markdown][2]. The great thing about NV is that it syncs with Simplenote.
[1]: http://notational.net/
[2]: https://github.com/panicsteve/nv
Great show, as usual! I really liked the markdown geeky-ness and explanation of just what it is in practical terms. My question is that if I commit to this will I be stitching together a lot of different things? For instance, I want to create an article for a website so I use, say, TextEdit to create the markdown file. Then I run it through a terminal command line to convert to html and then upload that to the website? What if I want some HTML for a cheatsheet on my local machine, another trip through terminal?
I see it is being incorporated more and more but am leery since it is a hack here and a hack there. Notational Velocity has a MD hack but I have to compile it.. annoying.
Does anyone have a good workflow for different circumstances that’s not so pieced together or maybe a single GUI tool to convert MD to HTML? I don’t mind but it seems a lot of extra work for a tool to save work
Thanks!
@Daniel. I don’t use Textwrangler (TW) but the way could be the following: First, create the folder ~/Library/Application Support/TextWrangler Support/Unix Support/Unix Filters/. Then, add the pl-File there. After restarting TW you should see the Script in the “#!”-Menu under Unix Filters.
@Michel & Daniel: one of the easiest ways to get Markdown to html is via another tweak of NV by Christian Tietze: http://christiantietze.de/zettelkasten/nv/
Like Daniel I would like to hear something about the way David converted his book from Scrivener to Word. Playing around I see the capabilites of Scrivener to bring Multimarkdown to Latex. But I don’t see how to do the steps to Word in an easy way. David seems to suggest to export from Scivener to HTML and then import to word. Well, I have to admit to think about learing Latex as the better way to get printable results. Alas, I would appreciate any suggestions about how to make the way from markdown through scrivener into a printable document.
This is a simple MD experiment. I hope it’s not ugly looking. If so just delete it David and I’ll rewrite it. Too bad there’s no “preview post” in this system.
Wow! After I left my last post I stumbled upon a great article by J. Eddie Smith IV on Practically Efficient. In it he describes how his workflow goes. He uses Notational Velocity (modified (binaries) to use Markdown) and Hazel to process.
First he writes in NV and names it “draft Document Name”. When he is satisfied with the document he renames it to “pub Document Name” which Hazel is set to watch for. Hazel sees this and copies it to a PublishHTML file. When Hazel sees a proper file enter that directory it generates the HTML file through another workflow he outlines in a different article on his site.
Eddie is a listener of MPU and gives you props. Overall, I am totally impressed with this workflow and it’s the kind of thing I can customize to meet my needs perfectly. I’m going to have fun working with this! Great job Eddie and if anyone was wondering about what I asked in the previous comment check out Practically Efficient!
Hi! I have been playing around with MultiMarkdown and, I really love the incorporation of CSS to simple text!!! Could you tell me somewhere to get some CSS examples “for documents” (not web pages). I tried http://fletcherpenney.net/css/document.css included in some examples by him, and is really great how professional the documents appear with that CSS.
I have been trying to find some CSS out there and they are programed to complete webs, NOT FOR DOCUMENTS, which is what I need. Any help??? (of course I need to say I do not know what CSS was, so I do not know how to code it…)
While this episode (as most of the others) is probably very interesting to Mac users without any/much knowledge of the episode’s subject, it’s not really addressing Mac power users – as the name of your podcast suggests.
I started subscribing to your podcast because of the excellent Merlin Mann episode where I learned quite a bit new. Since then, I hardly picked up anything new though—at least in the episodes where I knew something about the subject.
Please don’t take this as criticism, I think you’re doing a great job at explaining the topics in each episode, the podcast just isn’t really tailored to power users in my opinion.
@ Uwe
Well, I think that if someone was to aspire to be a Mac Power Users, then the name of this Podcast is still quite appropriate.
Being that you are beyond this material, you should just disregard the episodes which you “knew something about the subject.”
This one was WAY too geeky for me. Had to skip it. Looking forward to the iTunes show which is something I have lived and breathed for years now and really love.
How about some discussion on proper installation. I get that MD is really easy to use if all you want to do is add tags to a text file and export to html, but it gets complicated when you start talking about MMD and LaTeX and exporting to PDF or RTF and don’t get me started with XSLT.
It sounded like David can do RTF all day from Scrivener, and Fletcher can make just about anything with MMD and LaTeX, but I feel the online documentation is lacking on how to get this to work right. I wanted to make pdf files, but spent some much time trying to get the export to work right I gave up. So, if you do any follow up a great walk-thru on proper installation would be great – especially if it is just working in TextEdit and creating MD and MMD files and then exporting them to RTF or PDF.
Does anyone have a workflow to do emails via markdown or, better, multimarkdown? I can create files and convert them to HTML but then how can I send them via email without making the HTML file an attackment? I use PostBox currently but would consider other clients if I could just “stick” the HTML into the message
David recommended MarkdownMail for the i-devices but I’m really looking for something for my iMac as well.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Hi gang! I wanted to follow up on my last comment for anyone interested.
So far I have chosen to go with TextMate for my programming editor extraordinaire and it has a bundle for MD and MMD. From a document in the editor I can choose Bundles – Markdown – MultiMarkdown – Generate Output and Open in Browser. My browser opens with the HTML version in it and I can copy and paste that into a new email in Postbox.
It’s not smooth but works until something better comes along. I’m hoping the email clients will soon adopt MD/MMD.
Cheers!
I wanted you to know that thanks to this podcast, I have now posted my first ever MultiMarkdown-penned postThanks!