I have been trying to configure TextMate to use as an external editor to Scrivener, but I can’t get it to work. it is in relation to a MMD project that needs some cleaning up as I have found the MMD export is not all that good (in particular I need to change the fonts).
I have (I think) created the necessary configuration in TextMate to use the - mate command
I was expecting the keystroke ctrl-cmd-E to toggle text in and out of the TextMate window.
I have read the relevant section of the TextMate manual a few times – I am hoping someone can give me a plain English step-by-step as I don’t really get into Unix much.
Unfortunately, on Leopard and Snow Leopard you probably will need to get into the UNIX stuff a bit, because the method TextMate uses is officially deprecated by Apple and doesn’t automatically work any more. There is a blog post on the TextMate site which gives a detailed step-by-step way of getting it to work. I’d recommend using that resource—it worked for me the last time I tried.
Another thing you could consider doing is Folder Sync. Just export .txt files from the Draft into a synced folder from within Scrivener; edit them in TextMate, and then sync them back in when you are done.
I’m not sure what TextMate will do for you beyond what Scrivener does in terms of fonts though. Are you using LaTeX or XHTML for your output? Style based decisions generally are made outside of either of these programs—which is kind of the ideal behind MMD. The source file itself doesn’t define style, but merely the structure of a document. Styles are applied later on via stylesheets, so it doesn’t really matter if you use TM or Scrivener to generate the MMD file.
However, when I used Scrivener to generate my MMD output, the html output was messy. I didn’t really get what I wanted to get in one pass. I would have needed to clean it up.
How would you recommend getting good, clean, MD or MMD-formatted html output from Scrivener?