Writing in MultiMarkdown in Scrivener?

Scrivener Markdown & LaTeX
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Sorry if this seems like a stupid question or someone’s already answered it already. I’ve been browsing through this forum and various web sites for a couple of hours now trying to find an answer to the bolded question (and others) below.

There’s seems to be a lot of info detailing transforming MMD to something else using Scrivener, but I’m just wondering (since I’ve had a bit of trouble exporting HTML/ePub formatted text),

Do I just write in Scrivener using MMD formatting?

Do I open a new project, go to the first scene, and just start writing with asterisks for italics and double-asterisks for bold? Can I use MMD in text files in Research, Notes, and other folders?

Can I simply format a list by writing asterisk, dot, space, and the item?

Am I supposed to tell Scrivener that I’m using MMD or do I just write in MMD and then worry about the format at the Compile step?

Sorry if this seems a stupid question, but it seems no-one has simply said yay or nay to this.

Additional: I feel I should add for those thinking, “Isn’t it obvious?”

Well, no, not really. When I’m editing in MMD it’s usually in a plain text editor. Scrivener is not a plain text editor, so when it styles the text I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be writing using MMD or not - and whether or not any formatting that Scrivener does (font choice, font size) will have any bearing on the output or cause Scrivener to pause and ask me if I’m sure of the output format.

When I import an MMD formatted file Scrivener breaks it up as I’d expect, but the text editing area still has the text formatting tools and it’s not a plain text editor.

I just want to make sure I don’t go writing a heap of stuff in MMD and find out I was supposed to pick some sort of mode or function first.

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Yup! That’s all you do. Scrivener has MultiMarkdown integration, but is not an MMD editor, which means that for the most part you will be working in MMD syntax and treating the editor as though it were plain-text. With the exception of footnotes, comments, graphics and section headings, you would type everything in; asterisk for lists and all that. Consult the user manual for how Scrivener handles these specifically mentioned MMD features.

As for using a rich text editor for drafting what is essentially a plain-text file, yeah it’s different—but if you’re anything like me you’ll not only get used to it, but end up preferring it. I like that I can mark revision levels for editing, highlight text, see images right in the editor, use Scrivener’s features for comments and footnotes, and so on. In fact I can use these features and other marking tools with more abandon than I might otherwise, since everything will be stripped out to plain-text. The drawback is that it does mean any kind of syntax highlighting doesn’t work, since that would conflict with natural formatting.

That is a choice you make when you compile. Scrivener doesn’t care at all what you do prior to that point. There are no modes for this.

1 Like
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Ah, okay.

Well that adds an interesting twist to my workflow.

Anything I write in MMD will be part of the draft, and any rich text formatting I do can be for “meta-data” like marking something for revision later.

Cool.

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That’s exactly what happened to me!

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Very grateful for this thread Celotil, thanks :slight_smile:

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A post was split to a new topic: How to paste Markdown text as rich text