I spent some time poking through the forums to try to understand why scrivener won’t generate markdown syntax as part of the compile process, and I think I understand where you are coming from. Because RTF gives you the ability to have all kinds of formatting that are impossible to support in markdown it’s not feasible to guarantee that you’ll be able to always generate valid output and then people would blame the export process.
What I am looking for is some way for the text I’m editing to look beautiful while I’m writing so I’m not annoyed and distracted by the lack of formatting, and then for the output to be something I can either drop into whatever tool I have to publish to or write a script to cross format. Markdown is perfect for that.
I see that I can use the rich formatting tools while editing in markdown, but that just looks terrible, a heading sized ## Witty Title ## is very ugly.
I did see you mention that you were considering adding a ‘best effort’ export option that would let users use a subset of RTF. That would be perfect for me, so consider this a vote.
The other option I saw someone post was the ability to enter markdown, but have scrivener display it as formatted. That would also work fine for me, if the markdown tags were only displayed while the cursor was inside the tagged section, and then it just looked as it should, that would be awesome.
I’m sure either one is a giant pain and you have plenty of other things to worry about, but I just wanted to throw my vote in there for some level of support for either live-formatting of markdown or generating markdown as part of the export.
I love the idea of Scrivener as a distraction free writing tool, but I find seeing all the markdown markup as I write very distracting, I hope you’ll sympathize.
It’s an amazing piece of software though, nice work.
I am looking at supporting the conversion of bold and italics to markdown, but nothing else. It wouldn’t be possible to convert Scrivener’s tables to MultiMarkdown tables and suchlike. (As for headers, these are handled by compiling document titles.) As for a live preview, Marked ( markedapp.com/ ) now supports previewing Scrivener files.
Marked is a great little app and works well with Scrivener. However, it does not do what the OP of this thread asked. The live formatting is in a separate window.
I was under the impression that Marked did something like that? Oh, you mean live formatting. Definitely no plans for that, as that is way beyond Scrivener’s scope. As I say, conversion from italics and bold to Markdown will be the best-case future scenario.
I may have whined about this elsewhere but Marked previews – brilliantly – the ENTIRE Scriv. project. No way I can see to make it simply preview the document which has focus in Scrivener. Damn.
Oh, I didn’t realise that. Have you tried emailing the developer? He seems like a nice guy who’s open to suggestions. (Heh, says the guy saying “no” in the Wish List thread. )
All the best,
Keith
For generating a preview for a current window on the mac I use :
Quick Cursor. This allows you to get the words into the text editor of your choice, edit what you need to and have those edits saved to your scrivener window. I “copy” the text to Multimarkdown Composer
Multimarkdown Composer. Any text editor will do but multimarkdown allows you to generate a preview with Marked(MMC can generate its own preview without Marked as well) without having to save the file.
I’m also looking to find a way (if it exists) to have Marked render only the selected Scrivener document. Fishing through the whole rendered document can get to be be pretty tedious. Any new information would be welcome. If someone else has already posted for Bret Terpstra at the Marked site, please post here so the rest of us can go add our comments to your post.
Scrivener is becoming the core of my serious writing and other document-heavy work and I’m becoming pretty fond of Markdown, too.
I’ve never had a huge problem with it being whole-draft. When auto-scroll isn’t working for me, using the ToC to get around to the spot I’m working on works well for me.
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