Applications that Support MultiMarkdown

Applications That Support MultiMarkdown

There are several applications and utilities out there that include support for MultiMarkdown, that can make it even easier to create your output documents.

If you know of something not included here, please let me know.

Movable Type

MultiMarkdown can be used with Movable Type. To install:

1. Place MultiMarkdown.pl in the mt/plugins/Markdown directory
2. Copy ASCIIMathML.pm into the same directory
3. Make sure SmartyPants.pl is also there

Now MultiMarkdown should be working with Movable Type. For some reason, however, it seems somewhat temperamental at times. I haven't been able to figure out why, but it works for me on my local machine and on my host's server. It has also worked for other users.

MultiMarkdown Drag and Drop

Early on, as MultiMarkdown became increasingly powerful (and complex) I realized that most people would want something a little easier to use than what had become a rather complicated command line string.

The first solution was a set of Drag and Drop applications created using Platypus. These were designed to allow you to drop a MultiMarkdown text file on the application icon, and they spit out a .xhtml, .pdf, .rtf, or .tex file, depending on which application you used.

These utilities are still available, and have been updated to work with the "Common" MultiMarkdown Installation:

• http://files.fletcherpenney.net/MultiMarkdownDragAndDrop.zip

Scrivener

[Scrivener] is a:

... project management tool for writers that acts like your own little writing shed at the bottom of the garden, where you have cork notice-boards, ring-binders, photos, clippings paperclipped to jottings, notebooks and reams of typewritten pages piling up

• along with a secretary who keeps it all in neat piles and uses his speed-reading skills to find what you need as soon as you need it. [#Blount][]

As of beta 3, Scrivener has the ability to export to a MultiMarkdown text file, or to run the conversion utilities to create XHTML, RTF, or LaTeX files. It also has support for MultiMarkdown metadata.

Scrivener's strengths, as they relate to MultiMarkdown, included the ability to arrange and re-arrange your document as desired using its outliner view, cork-board, and other features. It also has some limited ability to convert RTF bold and italic formatting into MultiMarkdown syntax, which can be useful when converting documents from other formats.

Scrivener is primarily focused towards creative writing, but when combined with MultiMarkdown it is very useful for academic and technical writing where a LaTeX file is highly desirable.

Keith Blount has done a great job with Scrivener, and I was happy to be able to help implement support for MultiMarkdown. I look forward to helping to continue to use and refine this program myself.

At this time, Scrivener is in public beta, and should be available for purchase towards the end of 2006 or beginning of 2007. But the beta is very usable as is, and gives you until Jan 2007 or so to try it out.

For more information, I have created a User's Guide to MultiMarkdown and Scrivener:

• http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_with_scriv/

[#Blount]: Literate and Latte - Scrivener.
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

OmniOutliner

I have written an export plugin for OmniOutliner that allows you to craft your MultiMarkdown documents within OmniOutliner, and then export to a text file (or folder with text file and images), that can then be processed with Markdown or MultiMarkdown.

http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/multimarkdown_and_omnioutliner/

TextMate

[TextMate][] is a powerful text editor that:

brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike....

Created by a closet UNIX geek who was lured to the Mac platform by its ease of use and elegance, TextMate has been referred to as the culmination of Emacs and OS X and has resulted in countless requests for both a Windows and Linux port, but TextMate remains exclusive for the Mac, and that is how we like it![#macromates][]

TextMate is somewhere between a text editor for programmers, and a writing tool. If you like being able to customize your writing environment, and like fancy tools to handle the formatting for you, then TextMate might be the app for you.

Allan Odgaard created an initial Bundle that added Markdown support to TextMate. It included some basic MultiMarkdown support as well. But to be honest, I had trouble getting it to work. And if I had difficulty, I can only imagine how much trouble others had.

So I created my own Bundle. It includes a lot of features that automatically format metadata, lists, tables, headers, etc. It can clean up the text to make it look as presentable as possible in plain text, and it can then automatically convert your text into XHTML, RTF, Word, or LaTeX/PDF.

I have subsequently rewritten this bundle as a fork of the original on github. This should make it easier to incorporate changes, and possibly to merge the two projects into a single bundle.

• http://fletcher.github.com/markdown.tmbundle/

[#macromates]: TextMate --- The Missing Editor for Mac OS X.
http://macromates.com/

Using Scrivener and TextMate Together

It is possible, using the "Edit in TextMate" feature from TextMate. Basically, it adds the ability to edit any Cocoa based text editor view in TextMate. This allows you to edit the text from a Scrivener document in TextMate, in order to take advantage of the automatic formatting, while still retaining the organizational features of Scrivener.

This feature has its limitations (it breaks the undo stack in Scrivener) and is only for advanced users. I take no responsibility for it, as I didn't write Scrivener or TextMate. But it can be useful...

To learn more, check out the information on Cocoa Text Fields:

• http://manual.macromates.com/en/using_textmate_from_terminal

The "Common" MultiMarkdown approach

During beta testing of the MultiMarkdown support with Scrivener, it was proposed that having a standard location for MultiMarkdown could make it easy to integrate with various applications, and to allow the user a single place to update their MultiMarkdown files, independent of the application it was being used with.

For Mac OS X users, this boils down to allowing a MultiMarkdown installation to be placed in one of two locations, where it is available to any application that knows to look for it there:

• ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown

• /Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown

The first is available only to the user, and the second is available to anyone on that computer.

When Scrivener, or another application that supports this feature is run, it checks to see if a MultiMarkdown installation is available in either of those places. If not (the first time you run the program, for instance), then some programs might install a version of MultiMarkdown here; others might simply use an a copy of MultiMarkdown embedded within the application bundle.

The benefit of this approach is that if I update MultiMarkdown, you can simply replace the updated files in the Application Support folder, without having to update the other applications.

Please let me know if you have suggestions on improving this feature, or if you are interested in including support for MultiMarkdown in your own application.

Naturally, this approach only works with Mac OS X. If anyone is interested in working on a similar feature for other operating systems, please let me know.

Create Your Own

Between shell scripts, applescripting, Automator, and other tools, you can usually find an easy way to incorporate MultiMarkdown into your own workflow. If you find something that you think should be added here, let me know!