Pandoc to all converter

Scrivener Markdown & LaTeX
1

Hi there, now that the new windows version has the long awaited (certainly from me :wink:) MMD-support I surfed around for a quick editor that shows me the basic mmd-syntax and on the same time the final look.

MarkdownPadis nice but only supports the standard markdown and not the multi version.

So I looked further and finally found a very very nice multi-platform tool with even an online try-out panel.

Here’s a quick cut&paste from the about page:

Would be nice if scrivener could support a simple one-click preview window


2

I am new to MMD. Pandoc really seems usable, but I haven’ installed and tried it yet.

However, I noticed only references to MarkDown, not to MultiMarkDown. But, there are “Pandoc extensions”. Can anyone (Philipp?) tell if these are comparable to MMD? Have you tried to process MMD file generated by Scrivener further using Pandoc? Are there any caveats?

Thank you.
Borut

3

Most of what Scrivener does that would impact a Pandoc workflow, with MMD, is if you use any of the images or footnote features in the editor. If you dispense with those automations, then you could create a Markdown compliant document. The MultiMarkdown part of it is mostly in those few automations, and in the integration of the post-processing system. Footnotes are the main thing, I’m not sure how Pandoc’s MD converter handles them if at all. Images would be basically the same as Markdown, you could probably use them, but the results might be slightly odd. I’m not sure because I haven’t tried, but Scrivener puts the image name in the first part of the syntax, where the alt/id bit goes in Markdown. So if that came up visible in Pandoc it might look strange. This will be changing soon. Scrivener will be updating to MMD3 soon, and with that change means it will start putting any caption, if supplied, into that first part of the syntax. This is not backward compatible with Markdown in the most thorough definition, though it doesn’t break anything either. So I’d experiment if you intend to use images. Otherwise, what you type into the editor is what Scrivener outputs. It generates headers for you based on outline order, if you choose to let it do so, and those are all basic Markdown headers, so that’s fine and useful. Oh, one other thing, remove all of the stock entries in the Meta-Data compile option pane. You’ll probably need to make your own Pandoc meta-data block. I’d advise putting whatever you need to put there, in a document named “Meta-Data” at the top of the draft.

4

Wow - that was fast! Thank you very much!

I have just found (probably should have tried harder before posting questions here) the following page comparing Pandoc and MMD: Pandoc vs Multimarkdown. That information and your answer make me want to try all that soon. :slight_smile:

I am using the Windows version of Scrivener and am aware that it will not be long before the new version supporting MMD is out there (do not have the guts to use the latest beta regularly yet). Is this new version perhaps going to support MMD3? Namely, as far as I can interpret Pandoc image handling, what you are announcing regarding images is going to be compatible with Pandoc.

5

Just to mention it, the reason why I am using Pandoc is mainly the online converter to try out mmd-code. All the (windows) editors I have found were only the simple markdown or for the mac. Pandoc does the extended markdown, too.

It was also very helpful at the beginning, since I had quite some quirks getting scrivener and mmd do what I want (mainly tables). That way I could compare both converted .tex files to slowly fiddle out what’s wrong.

Now I stick with mmd and only use Pandoc for a quick online conversion-test.

6

Yes, in fact we were very pleased with MMD3 was announced, as getting MMD2 into Scrivener for Windows was rife with issues owing to its dependencies upon a UNIX-like framework of Perl and other support systems. So without a 100mb Scrivener download with a Perl-ball for something most people don’t need, or portions of the interface that don’t work without semi-advanced tool installations, it was tough. So happily MMD3 does not have these problems and getting the system engineered into the compiler was, I hear, quite straightforward.

That’s good to see they’ve gone with the new MMD3 way of handling pictures, and pictures with captions. Footnotes also look good. You should be able to use Scrivener’s rich text footnote feature to generate footnote syntax (and most importantly, handle the pesky task of coming up with footnote IDs).