There have been a lot of great responses to my request for a primer on markdown and template. I'll try to synthesize some of the threads and ask a few new questions at the end of the post
Difficulties in Collaboration ============================= I have the perception, perhaps a false one, that Textmate is primarily a program geared for software developers or web designers. All of my colleagues use Word for curriculum development, tests, and assignments. Colleagues don't get it when I send a markdown formatted document to them. While I use textmate for a variety of tasks, I stumped at how I can drop Word without retraining my colleagues.
_On May 16, 2006, at 9:54 PM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote_:
Well, I would guess the middle ground for you would probably be
RTF, which Word can read and incorporate. So you can keep your things in Markdown, and convert them to RTF before sending them.
The problem here in essence is the "ubiquity" of Word, in that it
is considered a "standard" in a way, while on the contrary it is a very proprietary format. There are a number of free, non-proprietary "standards" for transmitting information. The question is whether this is a battle you want to fight really. Let's take each thing at a time:
- When someone sends you a Word file, you have the following
options:
a. Suck it up and open it in Word and work with it. b. You can ask them to send it as plain text. c. I think TextEdit opens most Word files. Open it up, select the
text and copy and paste to TextMate, then make necessary changes to make it abide to Markdown syntax.
d. Write/find a converter (http://naivist.net/tips/index.php/
2006/02/02/word_to_markdown_converter/)
e. Find someone potentially willing to write a converter, and
then keep on pestering them until they do.
In any case, you can direct them to this page: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
- When you want to send text to someone and make it readable from
Word:
a. Send them a plain text document, and ask them to open it in
Word :)
b. Write it in Markdown and convert it to rtf and send it to
them. Then Word can be very happy with that.
c. Actually (gasp) write the thing in Word. d. Send them a pdf file (either from LaTeX or markdown) and see
what they can do with it.
e. Send them an html file, and ask them to ask Word to convert
it. Surely Word should be able to do that :)
Optionally, have very long discussions with them about what their
problems are with the Markdown format. It is supposed to be intuitively clear and readable, what exactly is their problem?
I guess the real question is how much you want to accommodate them
and their workflow against a more open standard and your workflow. Personally, I would try to retrain your colleagues into using a format that is more interchangeable, like LaTeX. But I might have too much of a tendency to think I am always right :)
On Dumping Word =============== On May 17, 2006, at 8:53 AM, Mark Eli Kalderon wrote:
I have dumped Word and wordprocessing more generally and now work entirely in TextMate. The MultiMarkdown facility of the Markdown bundle is especially useful since you can generate, xhtml, LaTeX, PDF, and RTF (if you need to share docs to be edited by others who wordprocess) all from a Markdown. In addition I write slides in Beamer. So I have all my needs met. Been doing this for awhile.
Workflow: Making a bulleted list in textmate ============================================== I was concerned that having to type out all of the markdown syntax was burdensome.
On May 16, 2006, at 9:54 PM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
If I undestand correctly, you want to go from:
one two three
to
- one
- two
- three
In that case, select the first two lines, press option followed by
star and space. Or better, create a command with code the single line:
sed 's/(.*)/* \1/'
with input set to selected text, fall-back line, and output set to
replace selected text.
With this command, you'll want to select all three lines.
In addition, On May 16, 2006, at 10:07 PM, Brad Choate wrote:
There's also the excellent Outlines bundle. Select those lines and
hit Ctrl+Cmd+O (letter o) and select "Tabs to Markdown". In this case, it will simply add '* ' >in front of each line.
Getting Markdown into other formats via textmate ================================================
LaTex ----- In a private email exchange with Haris, I asked if LaTex is a good solution for getting markdown documents to print. Haris gave me permission to post his response:
Yes i would strongly recommend LaTeX. Of course, being a
mathematician I practically live by it, but in general it is an excellent typesetting software: Its *job* is to produce documents for printing, and it does an excellent work with bibliography, cross- referencing, indexes etc. If you are writing anything more than a page or two, the I would do it in LaTeX. Plus, with the beamer document class, you can design some pretty cool presentations (http:// latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/).
And I am pretty sure there is a MultiMarkdown to LaTeX converter
that you can use.
I personally use LaTeX for all my (modest) class needs. You can
find examples of handouts and tests here:
http://www.iwu.edu/~cskiadas/currentCourse/2006Math161/index.html
If you do want to look into LaTeX, there are of course many
sources but here is mine:
RTF --- * What are the best ways to go from markdown to RTF?
PDF --- * What is the quickest/easiest way to go from Markdown to PDF?