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:

1. 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

2. 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:

http://www.iwu.edu/~cskiadas/latexTutorials/latexInfo.html

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?

I'm almost there. . . .

When I click the Markdown gear, I see Preview, preview in browser, covert selection to HTML, Heading level 1, Heading Level 2.

To get a PDF, I clicked preview and print preview. This is very cool. Is there a direct way to get a PDF file?

I don't see convert to PDF or convert to RTF.

Do I need to update the bundle? If so, how?

Thanks!

This is an amazing program. I am going to cut my demo short and buy it today!

Stephen

On May 18, 2006, at 5:20 AM, Jacob Rus wrote:

nachodog wrote:

...

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?

You want the "convert to RTF" and "convert to PDF" commands, respectively. Both are in the Markdown bundle. Click the little gear menu in the status bar, and find the commands listed under the bundle name. There are also keyboard shortcuts for them, ctrl- shift-r, and cmd-ctrl-shift-p.

-Jacob

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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).

Probably need to set the path:

http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/docs/ch01s03.html#configure_dports

Jeff.

On May 18, 2006, at 9:11 PM, nachodog@mac.com wrote:

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).

So close. . . I installed DarwinPorts. Should I go to any special directory in the terminal?

Here is what I ended up with. . .

ndog:~ ndog$ sudo port install htmldoc Password: sudo: port: command not found ndog:~ ndog$

Thanks, Stephen

...

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