A friend and I did some collaborative writing in EtherPad using MMD notation.
How do I import it into my document in v1.2.3.0 for Windows? The documentation said there should be a File -> Import -> Multimarkdown File command, but there’s just File -> Import -> File or Web Page, and even though one of the options is to choose MMD files, it doesn’t convert it into scrivening form when I import it.
Thanks, I believe I have cleaned up these references out of the documentation. I removed one from the section on the meta-data block header in the Draft, and then removed the entire section on importing MMD files. Both of these instances were in the chapter on MMD.
Sorry for the confusion. I thought this was going to be implemented in the first round but it looks like they ran short on time.
So there’s currently no way to convert MMD text into properly marked up text at the moment?
That’s disappointing. I’m trying to figure out a way I can import collab-written stuff from EtherPad or Google Docs, but whenever I try it just screws up the formatting. I can paste text as it is and lose the style match, or I can paste to match the style and lose all my italics. I had thought from the docs that MMD was going to be my solution. This is really annoying.
Oh, if that is what you were expecting, then there probably never will be. That isn’t what this feature is for. As noted in the sections that will be removed, it is strictly for interpreting header levels. If you visualise your MMD header depth structure as a tree, then Scrivener would import the file and turn it into an outline structure that matches that tree, putting any text falling between headers into the appropriate files in the binder.
I’m not sure what your workflow looks like though. You had stated that the original documents have been marked up already—but in the last message you state you are seeing italics drop out? I’m not sure why you need to paste and match style if you want italics. Perhaps there is some misunderstanding over what MMD is. It is not a rich text format, there are no italics. Everything in it can be done in a plain-text editor, like Notepad. Nothing at all would be lost by using paste and match style.
Excuse me, but that’s not what it says. It says that “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format,
then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).”
I am wanting to “write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format”, in which I use, for example, asterisks to denote italics, and then convert it into pre-marked-up text in Scrivener. That’s also what the example on Fletcher Penney’s website, which is linked from the manual, shows people doing. If that’s not what it’s supposed to be for, why are you confusing people by linking to sites that suggest it is?
In fact, MimeticMouton said in this thread that I would be able to do exactly that with MMD when the feature had been imported from the Mac version to the Windows version.
At the moment, if I write things together with a friend in Google Docs, marking up the italics there, when I paste them into Scrivener they show up in their original Google Docs font, sometimes with excess line spacing or tabs. Not the font I want them in, and not arranged in the style as they should be. And the same thing seems to happen if I save it as a word or HTML file and import it. But if I do control + shift + V instead to put them into Scrivener in the default style so I get the font and spacing I want, it strips out all italics. So I either have to put in a lot of extra effort fixing the spacing and font and stuff, or put in a lot of extra effort putting italics back in. I thought Scrivener was supposed to make this stuff easier.
So I want to write in MMD, with asterisks for italics and double asterisks for bold, and import and convert that into Scrivener instead, so I don’t have to worry about crap like font and tabs and things. At the moment, I can’t seem to do that.
If the main thing you want to do is to write your text using MMD (italics, bold) and then get it out in another format with the markup as real formatting then, yes, you can write in Googledocs or whatever, import the plain text (with markup) into Scrivener and carry on writing in Scrivener using markup.
However, the conversion from markup to real formatting doesn’t take place within Scrivener, it happens as you leave Scrivener. Once the text is ready you have to compile using one of the MMD --> something options (the somethings being Latex, PDF, RTF, HTML or FODT). It’s that compile which will turn your italics and bold into italics and bold.
If I’ve understood your workflow correctly that should do what you are looking for.
I have no idea why you are being so rude, but we’ll give it another shot.
Everything you’ve said in your clarification is fine. That is what Markdown is, and by extension that is what MultiMarkdown is. The latter has some extra features for book construction that Markdown does not address, as well as export formats that are useful to authors. Scrivener integrates these export methods into its compilation system. So you can use all of its organisational power on your project. The main difference is, of course, that when you are writing in the project you write using MultiMarkdown notation. Asterisks instead of bold and italics and so on. It will also convert footnotes and images to MMD syntax for you. After it has compiled your work into a single MMD text file, to a temporary location, it then runs the multimarkdown.exe utility to produce the output format you request in the compile settings. So you get your HTML file, an OpenOffice file, LaTeX and OPML. That’s what it does, so linking to the original Markdown definition and Fletcher Penney’s site is not a point of confusion. These systems do that, and Scrivener uses these systems in integration, so it does that as well (though not directly, it has the MultiMarkdown engine embedded in the installation so you don’t have to bother with installing it yourself).
But the whole system is predicated on the plain-text markup way of working. That means the stuff you import as well. Now we do have a planned feature for converting italics and bold to asterisks. This will be something you run on a document in the editor. But the import feature is for specifically importing MultiMarkdown text documents, not for importing rich text documents and converting them to MMD. It will take a plain-text MultiMarkdown document and convert it to Scrivener outline structure—it is thus very handy for round-tripping. You can compile a MultiMarkdown document, edit it elsewhere or have someone else edit it, then import it back in when this feature is enabled and get your original outline structure back. But it’s a plain-text importer (since it is importing plain-text files).
If you want to have your collaborator work with you using MMD, they need to use asterisks instead of their word processor formatting—or you need to convert it yourself. You might be able to find a tool or macro that can do this for you. I’ve never looked for one myself, but it strikes me as the sort of thing someone has probably done.
As for fixing the base formatting beyond italics and bold, we already have a feature for that which is useful to everyone, not just MMD users, because this problem with mismatching formats is of course quite common (and one of the things I dare say drives some people to MMD in the first place). The feature you want there is Documents/Convert/Formatting to Default Text Style. This will retain inline formatting where sensible, like italics and bold, but fix up indents, font family & size, line-spacing and paragraph spacing. It’s a bulk tool, so you can run it on many selected documents at once.
So this was the source of my confusion. I took “marked up” literally in your statement on how the file was originally written, as in, it was already marked up with asterisks.