Custom styles with MMD

Scrivener Markdown & LaTeX
1

Hi,

I have a Word template from my publisher and I need to deliver the draft using that one. The template is full of custom styles, like instead of Normal style they have Body Paragraph, etc.

I am considering to use MMD in Scrivener and export to MS Docx format. Is there a way to write in MMD defining the style? For example,

[Body Paragraph]This is new…

Thanks

John

2

There is no way to directly do that, MultiMarkdown is based on broad types of text (heading, quotation, bullet, etc.), where stylesheets are designed around those broad types. So in other words if you have a normal paragraph of text, that will get assigned to “body” in ODF format (its only word processing format, it doesn’t support DOCX) without you having to tag each and every paragraph that way. Every level 2 heading will get a “Heading 2” style applied to it, that sort of thing. The result is very vanilla, and designed to be easily adapted to existing templates, but like I say you will have to convert that ODF file to DOCX with LibreOffice or NisusWriter Pro (or anything else that can work in both of those formats, but last I checked those were the two).

3

I thought so.

Thanks a lot AmberV.

4

You can use the document converter Pandoc (http://pandoc.org). Write in Scrivener using Pandoc markdown syntax (very similar to MMD). When you need export to DOCX. Compile out of Scrivener as MMD into txt or MMD file then use Pandoc to convert it DOCX (command line) using the provided template DOCX from the publishers as the style reference. e.g. “pandoc -S --reference-docx twocolumns.docx -o UsersGuide.docx README” (http://pandoc.org/demos.html

5

Pandoc with a template is a good option, but you may need to edit the template so that the style names are consistent with the pandoc output. Don’t forget also that Word has a Styles organiser that allows you to copy styles between documents (with a really crap GUI, LibreOffice is miles better for this).