[TxMt] Re: primer on markdown & textmate

[Robert M. Ullrey]

Alternately, you can "convert to HTML" and then run the Prince [1]  
program to change it into a PDF with the ability to use CSS style  
sheets for formating.  If you know CSS even a little you can turn  
markdown and multimarkdown into a great publishing system (see:  
<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/goingtoprint>).

I understand what you mean about the over use of MS Word in academia.  
I have the same problems. I switched a longtime ago to writing in  
LaTeX and while the pages are of an extremely high quality, and I  
never have issues of fonts suddenly changing, or tabs or columns  
changing, it can be frustrating that others at the university refuse  
to change. My solution has been to change markdown into an RTF for  
distribution if I want others to be able to write into the document,  
or to PDF if only to review. When they send me text, I request .rtf  
or .txt and not .doc . However, for those times when they do send  
me .doc files, I just open and change them over to plain text and  
then open in Textmate. One caution though is that .doc footnotes get  
lost, so keep a copy of the .doc file for reference if needed.  
Alternately, and if I have several files to convert, I use the mac  
commandline program textutil to convert "textutil -convert rtf  
foo.doc" converts foo.doc to foo.rtf.

Hope this helps too.
Robert

____________
[1] Prince <http://www.princexml.com/> is fully functional and free  
for academic dissertations and demonstration use but adds a front  
page to the document.



On May 18, 2006, at 6:24 AM, Allan Odgaard wrote:

> It should be mentioned though, that the Convert to PDF requires  
> `htmldoc`, which can be installed e.g. via DarwinPorts (sudo port  
> install htmldoc).

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