As the title suggests, I’ve been writing using MultiMarkDown in Scrivener for about 8 months now and enjoying the benefits immensely.
Now I’m trying to export to iBooks Author to do some more complex formatting (I’d even be OK with using Pages to do this if I have to.) The problem is that I can’t figure out how to export Markdown from Scrivener and then convert such that the images, text and headings are all transferred to iBooks. Is this possible? If so, I’d really appreciate some help.
Thanks!
Eli
PS. I bought Marked app but doesn’t display the images I’ve inserted into either the Scrivener document or the MD export (though Mou does.) In general Marked never seems to display my Scrivener file correctly either. But neither app allows the sort of export I’m looking for anyway.
Since the new version of iBooks Author supports importing ePub files, you could try using Pandoc to convert your MMD document to ePub. You would compile to plain “MultiMarkdown”, and then tweak the resulting .txt file to Pandoc specifications. Since you’d be using another program to finalise the e-book, you could probably get by with a very minimal output, rather than delving deep into all of the options available.
Another approach would be, as you say, the word processor route, but I’d actually recommend LibreOffice for that, at least initially. MultiMarkdown supports that format natively, and the output quality to it is quite good. Once you have the .fodt file opened, you can save it as .doc, which you can then import into iBooks Author, or work on in Pages first.
I’m not sure what you’ve been trying up until this point, but images ordinarily should not be a problem with any of the above.
Marked is great, I use it every day myself, but it doesn’t do anything terribly complicated with a Scrivener project when you preview it. It isn’t meant to replace compiling—it’s more a useful tool if you like the “two pane” approach taken in programs like MultiMarkdown Composer, where you can type on one side and see a pretty-printed output on the other. To achieve this, Marked goes through the project binder, assembles all Draft associated RTF files, and then converts them to plain-text—hence your images and any other rich text formatting will be ignored. The magic that turns embedded images into MMD syntax is done by Scrivener when you compile, it’s not latent within the documents themselves.
To get around that, you could use native MMD syntax to indicate your images, so long as the images are placed in a location that Marked has access to.