MultiMarkdown: horizontal rule; image format

Scrivener Markdown & LaTeX
1

Hi all. Three questions:

  1. Scrivener inserts a horizontal rule (----) between sections in multi markdown. They are not acceptable to my publisher’s system. I can delete with an editor, or filter them with a Ruby program, I suppose, but is there a way to turn this off?

  2. Image output format is

![][imageName]

and all images are smushed into a folder with the MD file. My publisher’s system wants

where the square brackets are replaced with () and the images are placed in a folder with the MD file. Again, I can filter with a Ruby program or edit by hand but is there a way to change this behavior?

  1. Can I suppress the listing of images that is emitted at the end of the document? (What’s that for, anyway?) The MMD / images section in the manual isn’t fitting into my brain.

Thanks!

2

Make sure that all of the options in the Separators compile pane are set to “Empty Line”. This is an unfortunate collision of sensible defaults in the compiler, which sets the file/folder separator to Page Break (as most people organise logical sections of their book into folders), which doesn’t have any meaning for MMD in HTML or plain output, so this option becomes “Section break”, which is just [b]-----[/b], translating to [b]<hr/>[/b] on HTML output.

If the automatic image system doesn’t work for you, just use your own syntax and manage the images folder by hand. You can still use Scrivener to help with that—just keep an ‘images’ folder in the Binder and export it when needed. Note it is possible to establish a stable compile folder, where external files are not destroyed by the compiler, by appending “-mmd” to the folder name.

Scrivener uses the “reference” syntax system for all non-inline images. This is done by using a unique key to identify the image, and then stating that key at some later point in the document, with information about the graphic file’s location and any optional display attributes.

The advantage of using the referencing system in MultiMarkdown is that the unique key used to identify the image is also used as a bookmark anchor in the various output formats. This will be a label in LaTeX, an element ID in HTML and a bookmark in ODT. This allows one to refer to the image as a cross-reference in the text.

In Scrivener, there is not a UI for supplying the unique key, so it uses the image filename instead, as it was at the time of dragging it into the editor.

I presume your publisher is using some other add-on to allow cross-referencing figures, but ordinarily it would be desirable to use the referencing mechanism, which does result in that list of figures at the end of the document (and is harmless as they are only used as internal building blocks and never printed in the output).

3

Thanks Ioa / Amber. Very wise and complete as always.

R