The default setting assumes you are using Scrivener to compose Markdown directly, and it largely ignores any kind of formatting you may do. Formatting in that case becomes pure embellishment. I might use bold for example, for my own editorial benefit, to draw attention to some text or to make it look nice in the editor. If you want “bold” to actually mean something (strong emphasis in a Markdown sense, which is used for urgent or very important meanings), then styles are the best way to approach that, usually.
In other words there is a bit of a disconnect between how rich text editors work and semantic approaches like Markdown. In the latter the usage of syntax is meant to having a defined purpose. In rich text you can do whatever you want and make things look like what you mean. Bold is essentially meaningless, it is just a font selection. It would not be good for us to assume that because you chose a particular font style, it should mean something—unless you tick the setting that says, “Yes, assume that I want thicker font letters to mean strong emphasis.”
had to look at this thrice, Ioa – I think I see what you’re saying here, and agree.
My original thought, though, has to do with that ‘compose Markdown directly’, where I would expect MD character formatting (asterisks for various levels of emphasis) to just work. However it doesn’t, unless you find and check the ‘convert Markdown symbols’ option.
However. The way I am doing what i want for this special use case, to write Markdown and get something Google Docs can use, is Pandoc → Microsoft Word (docx). Notably, this isn’t ‘Markdown to Word’. So it may logically follow that I have to inform that it’s Markdown that Pandoc should expect, yes.
I unfortunately had some experience with using Pandoc separately which led to assumptions – though I’m well aware when I think about it what Pandoc requires to do this or other conversions…
Hopefully this explanation will help someone else, sometime
I’m not actually sure what you mean, or what option you are referring to precisely. The only close thing I can think of is the subsidiary option to full RTF conversion, Escape special characters. But that wouldn’t be relevant at all if you’re writing in Markdown, since you wouldn’t then want the rich text conversion option enabled.
With stock default settings, if you type This is a *test* of Markdown. into a blank project, set the compiler to Pandoc → DOCX and compile, you’ll get a .docx file with “This is a test of Markdown”. Simple as that. Things only get a bit more convoluted when you’re mixing rich text conventions with Markdown, to some degree.
But either way, this is all entirely aside from what the OP was running into I think, because they aren’t using any of the Markdown-based compile settings, and are in fact using regular old RTF or whatever, but enabling the option to treat the source material as a Markdown document, but were expecting only a few things to actually be considered as Markdown.
Honestly I kind of wish we never added that option. Hardly anyone actually writing in Markdown would want to use it, because the conversion is a bit sloppy, and the results you get from Markdown conversion engines tend to be of higher quality than what you get from Scrivener anyway. So with hardly anyone of the intended audience using it, all it ends up being is a point of confusion with people thinking it should only look for asterisks.
Well, don’t worry about it, please. I tried again, various combinations, and some things are reversed, etc… which is why it doesn’t sound right to you.
I don’t need this – I’ve got a fine Markdown editor (Typora), and in any case, I’d rather write these sorts of things in Pages on the iPad, whose docx output goes right into Google Docs.
Scrivener for fiction…and some other things just tracking ideas I’ve found it great for.
