On Dec 5, 2006, at 10:23 AM, Lloyd Williams wrote:

Lloyd,

I am sympathetic: I too am mostly a writer who understands only a little of what transpires on this list. That said, Kevin is describing to you ways of getting from MarkDown/MultiMarkDown to PDF using only free and open source materials. In this case, he is recommending that you use a converter to transform your MarkDown formatted files into LaTeX files. Think of Latex -- I hate doing all the capitals, so you only get them once -- as another form of markup, like HTML or MarkDown. It is a very precise form of markup long used by many in the sciences for getting the kind of outputs that others had access to only when word processers developed robust page-layout capabilities became widely available.

There are a wide variety of Latex installations available, you need only google Latex and Mac to discover them, or perhaps someone on this list will point you to a package particularly easily adapted/adopted by a newbie.

I can't help you there. I use Mellel when projects get to be a of certain structure or size.

I do enjoy doing a lot of writing in TextMate using the MarkDown formats, if only I could get some form of code-folding -- I've been meaning to ask this list about the possibility of using two returns as a way to cue the end of header and how one would include that within the parsing language in the bundle. (One of my goals for next year is to teach myself PERL -- I'm a folklorist, so PERL's language-oriented abilities are useful in and of themselves.)

I hope this helps. My apologies for blurting out my own question in the middle of my answer. I will re-post it if it doesn't make any sense at another time on this list.

john