I’ve been having issues with compiling to LaTeX after converting all the italics to MMD. Some of them don’t get the proper \emp{ conversions, and its really really frustrating going through hundreds of them. At first I could do just a search for the *astrixes that didn’t get converted, then I realized its not just those.
Should I recompile the same document several times? I can’t tell if they are better or just the same. My gut has a feeling this is a common problem though no search string I could think of produced any results.
Have you an A/B example of some text that is repeatedly not being recognised as emphasis? I suppose the easiest way to check for that would be to find something that you know should be emphasis, then locate that text in Scrivener and copy and paste the phrase and a bit around it, here (or PM me if you’d rather not post segments of text in public).
I can think of no reason to do that. Being based on plain-text, this stuff isn’t very complicated. If an asterisk is in the wrong place or a pair is used in a way that MMD isn’t programmed to handle (or is deliberately programmed to ignore) then it will always be that way—100% of the time.
What I would do, for the above request, is compile out of Scrivener as a plain MultiMarkdown text file and use that as your reference and test starting-point. On the official MMD site, you’ll find some handy “droplet” programs that are basically simple front-ends for the command-line tools. You can drop your compiled .md file to produce .tex documents easily this way, and test adjustments in your source file more quickly than with compile. Compile is 99% building that text .md file and a few fractions of a second turning it into a .tex document.
I think I figured out the issue: it has to do with the “convert” command “Convert Bold and Italics into MMD”. If you pressed the space key while it is still in italics, then it converts those spaces into surrounded with astrixes and then when compiling it tries to figure out which words are connected to those. Easy enough to fix, just time consuming.
Yeah, I figured that might be the problem. It is one of the reasons that we have never made that particular feature automatic, as a checkbox in the compiler—it would likely just result in bug reports about italics and bold not working. So it’s a one-shot tool that is meant to be proofed by a human after using it, precisely because it is so easy to accidentally style whitespace in a standard WYSIWYG style authoring environment. We might have some better ideas for this process in the future, though.
So it’s a one-shot tool that is meant to be proofed by a human after using it, precisely because it is so easy to accidentally style whitespace in a standard WYSIWYG style authoring environment. We might have some better ideas for this process in the future, though.