My MultiMarkdown Workflow

I have experimented with different ways of creating documents with MultiMarkdown, and this is my current favorite.

1. I author the document using Scrivener (for short documents I will sometimes use TextMate only).

2. When appropriate, I will use TextMate’s “Edit in TextMate…” feature to edit the text, and then save it back to Scrivener. Some of the shortcut features of TextMate in general, and my MultiMarkdown Bundle in particular are pretty handy.

3. When ready, I use Scrivener’s MultiMarkdown export feature to export to the format of choice (text, LaTeX (which then goes to pdf), or XHTML). (If I have any difficulty, I export to plain text, and then use TextMate or the command line to process the file so that I can read the errors).

4. There is no step 4.

Notes

I originally used OmniOutliner as my text-editing/organizing software of choice, and developed a Markdown export plugin for it that was compatible with MultiMarkdown.

I liked the ease with which you could reorganize the structure of your outline, but didn’t particularly care for how it felt to actually do my writing in the notes section, so I ended up changing to Scrivener and TextMate, after a brief effort at building my own app.

NOTE: It occurs to me that by using the “Edit in TextMate” feature (discussed here), OmniOutliner might again become a viable writing application, by using TextMate to actually do the text editing…. Just a thought.

For writing longer sections of text, or text that uses “complicated” MultiMarkdown features, TextMate, in combination with my MultiMarkdown Bundle, is the hands-down best environment. It has syntax highlighting, a bunch of autocompletions, XHTML previews, and too many features to count. It will clean up tables so they look nice and neat, organize your lists (and re-number them so that your source code makes it look as though you can count). It’s a phenomenal text editor. It’s primary weakness, when it comes to MultiMarkdown, is that is is not as good at organizing “massive” documents. When it comes to chapters, and sections, and sub-sections, and reordering them, TextMate is not at it’s best.

That’s where Scrivener comes in. Scrivener is great for writing prose. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles that TextMate has, but most of these are not as well suited for prose. Scrivener also excels at organizing the structure of your document - you have an outliner view, a corkboard view, and a tree view. When you decide that the 4th section of the 3rd chapter would actually be better off as the 2nd chapter — not a problem. Just drag and drop, and you’re set. TextMate doesn’t handle that part as well.

But when I come to a more complicated part of that document, I will use the “Edit in TextMate” feature mentioned above to provide the best of both worlds. A quick keystroke from within Scrivener, and the section I am working on is copied to TextMate, where I can use all of the syntax highlighting and other handy features. Once I’m happy with my work, another keystroke, and I’m back to Scrivener, with all of my changes in place. (The only caveat to this is some issues with affecting the ability to use the undo command, but snapshots can compensate for this to some extent.)

Hopefully, this explains some of the different ways to use MultiMarkdown, and why I choose the methods I use. Different programs are better suited to different tasks, and often it’s a matter of choosing the right tool for the job at hand. Of course, when someone comes out with a Scrivener-TextMate-OmniOutliner combination….