Fletcher Penney

I agree with the message of the post, i.e. make your tool do only one thing (the unix philosophy) but I am not sure breaking up a Markdown parser into a 3-staged pipeline is the best execution of it. Something like MultiMarkdown¹ converts Markdown to XML and then uses the XML tool suite (XSLT) to further transform that to (X)HTML, LaTeX, etc. and can be used to extract information from the Markdown documents as well (XPath/XQuery). Despite my dislike of XML this is more useful to me as a user because I don’t have to learn about his Markdent event API and write subclasses in Perl to actually examine the Markdown documents. ¹ http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/

I currently use Scrivener, MultiMarkdown, TexShop, MacTex and OmniGraffle if I have a diagram or two. http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html is a combination outliner/editor for OSX. Most of its features are focused on allowing you to manage a lot of different bits of a larger document. There's a full XSLT generation engine inside it so you can get it to generate just about anything you want if you're willing to roll up your sleeves a bit. http://fletcherpenney.net/MultiMarkdown is a simple markup syntax (derived from Markdown) which Scrivener supports. Scrivener and MultiMarkdown together generate HTML or LaTeX from the base document, so you need to use something like http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop and http://www.tug.org/mactex to get something worth printing.

While it's technically correct that Markdown has a mishmash of implementations (and technically correct is the best kind of correct, after all), it's worth pointing out that MultiMarkdown has both a well-defined feature set that includes things like tables, footnotes, and citations, a standard way to express metadata, and has a reference implementation in C. http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ And, you might say, "But I've never heard of MultiMarkdown," but the reality is that if you've used Markdown for creating, well, tables, footnotes or citations, or used a YAML metadata block for a Jekyll blog, or any number of things that weren't in the original Markdown spec but that people in practice do all the time, then you've used something that was either influenced by MultiMarkdown or something that MultiMarkdown adapted. And that last point is larger than MultiMarkdown, specifically. I'd argue that Markdown as commonly implemented and used can do an awful lot of things that are necessary for technical documentation work. This isn't to say that ReST or AsciiDoc aren't more powerful, but in practice, there's very little I've had to write that can't be written in (Multi)Markdown.

Feature requests: * YAML support So many of my markdown files have YAML front matter, it would be nice for Scriptum to render it properly. * Definition lists MultiMarkdown[1] and Kramdown[2]support definition lists which are pretty useful when authoring markdown [1]: https://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ [2]: https://kramdown.gettalong.org

I don't really understand what you're looking for, but the comments lead me to think of one thing that might be a little relevant, if not directly useful for you. In mediawiki it's called transclusion. There is a markdown extension with similar functionality called multimarkdown. I looked into it briefly for a project once, but ended up going with basic markdown instead to keep maintenance and content writing as simple as possible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Transclusion https://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/

Ha, it was a very Frankenstein-y stack. I wrote everything in markdown, then rendered to html with multimarkdown (https://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/), and then converted to pdf with wkhtmltopdf (https://wkhtmltopdf.org/) and to epub/mobi with Calibre's ebook-convert (https://calibre-ebook.com/)

If you're interesting in retooling your approach, you can try using a stripped down format, like Multi-markdown (http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/features/) and then converting from there to LaTeX or other formats using Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) or other tools. This has a learning curve by can definitely be easier than trying to wrangle TeX directly. I did kind of a roll-your-own publishing system (focusing on ePub) in an experimental fashion and it worked okay but I didn't spend too much time on it as I had other concerns. I did a writeup on that here (http://theheratik.net/books/tech-epub/), not that it matters much.

I use https://github.com/tpope/vim-markdown to write markdown files. And use http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ to 'compile' the markdown file. To check the rendered output I have a key mapping to compile the current markdown file and open the generated html file.

Markdown supports table. With Multimarkdown you get even more features of a traditional WordProcessor like footnotes, GitHub flavored code blocks, citations and bibliography, table and image captions etc. Unfortunately, not too many apps out there that support Multimarkdown. LightPaper (http://clockworkengine.com/lightpaper-mac) and Composer (http://fletcherpenney.net/2013/05/composer_23b) are only two that I'm aware of (for Mac OSX)

The spec. The spectacle. This fall, only on Twitter! I see the assertion that: >MMD has a very clear specification. It also has an openly available test suite. But the specification link goes to the help page [1] which as far as I can tell has no spec, just links to descriptions (Gruber's canonical blog post) and examples. Is there an actual spec for MMD, or are they claiming examples are specs? [1]: http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/help/

It implements a proprietary extended version of the Markdown syntax. I wonder why the author didn't look at MultiMarkdown (http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/), which is already a popular choice?

I agree with you. Markdown is meant to be very straightforward and simple, especially since it can be augmented with HTML. MultiMarkdown[1] and GFM[2] exist as variants of Markdown that can do much more, for those who want more... and I'm sure there are other flavors. [1]http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ [2]http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/

FYI MultiMarkdown by Fletcher Penney adds footnotes to standard Markdown, see http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/

I've had several requests for MultiMarkdown support (http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/features/), is PHP Markdown Extra similar to that? I believe MMD supports tables. Either way, yes, I plan on adding more rendering options for sure.

Those using MultiMarkdown[1], which this app seemingly doesn't support, may be interested in the MultiMarkdown Composer app[2] that should be out within a month or so. It's being worked on by the (very) active developer of MultiMarkdown and looks perfect for fans like myself. [1]: http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ [2]: http://multimarkdown.com/

Using MultiMarkdown in Scrivener and then generating LaTeX works pretty well for me, though I haven't written anything book-length with it. http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_with_scriv…