Biggest MultiMarkdown update yet!

07/31/2011 21:16:33

Yes — there’s a lot going on in “MultiMarkdownLand” at the moment. But I haven’t forgotten about the program that is at the center of it all…

MultiMarkdown 3.1 is now in beta, and includes the following updates:

  • fix bug in parsing table captions
  • fix bug in parsing table column alignments
  • add back support for tabulary in LaTeX
  • fix bug in ODF output
  • don’t match URL on first line as metadata
  • fix bug when manually specifying a label for headers
  • fix crash on certain table format
  • improve citation support in ODF
  • don’t output \end{doc} on LaTeX snippets
  • parse MultiMarkdown inside terms of definition lists
  • don’t output empty id attribute on images
  • add --nosmart and --nonotes options to disable smart typography and footnotes
  • improve parsing of single quotes
  • don’t trip over UTF-8 BOM at beginning of file
  • don’t allow nested <script> blocks
  • include other interim fixes from peg-markdown
  • fix bug in Metadata parsing that could be the cause of the runaway multimarkdown processes some people are seeing
  • performance improvements
  • improved --compatibility option that turns off all MultiMarkdown-specific features and emulates Markdown. The best Markdown program out there can now be MultiMarkdown!
  • improved testing for compatibility with the original Markdown
  • added --nolabels option that turns off automatic cross-referencing for a pretty big performance boost

And most importantly:

  • Glib2 is no longer required on the Mac OS X version!!!
  • MultiMarkdown is now easily included in other Mac OS X applications, either as a library, or as an included binary

Thanks to Daniel Jalkut, MMD is now able to run on Mac OS X without the installation of the Glib2 libraries. It is a self-contained binary without any external library dependencies, and relaxed machine/OS requirement. In fact, I have even run a test version of it on an old PowerPC G3 iBook running 10.4.11. The version I have compiled in the downloads section should run on 32 or 64 bit machines, on Mac OS X 10.7, 10.6, and 10.5. Once I get Xcode 3 reinstalled, I hope that the next version released will run on PowerPC machines running 10.4 as well.

This should improve compatibility with tons of older Macs out there!!!

For those who are interested — work is still progressing on the new Mac OS X MultiMarkdown editor, MultiMarkdown Composer. I’m still tracking down a few glitches and making some improvements, but it’s already become my editor of choice for MMD files, and has some pretty useful features. More to come, but I’m excited about it!

As always, you can download an installer here:

https://github.com/fletcher/peg-multimarkdown/downloads/

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Old Comments

I contributed a few commits to Daniel’s fork as well, where I added support for embedding the library in an iOS application (which use armv6 and armv7 architectures). Everything has been working without problems, and I’m working on some example code for using it via Objective-C.

There’s still a few kinks to be worked out - after pulling his latest commits last night, it turns out my build did not work on 10.5. I think I got the changes reverted to allow running on 10.5 (not able to test 10.4 or ppc yet).

Also, there’s a few glitches in his changes that broke some of the citation features that I reverted in my glibfree branch.

But this will be incredibly useful when it all becomes more stable!!