Markdown Drag and Drop

11/20/2005 10:00:08

MarkdownStuff

Introduction

After getting the kinks ironed out of my workflow, I wanted to have the ability to simply drag a MultiMarkdown formatted text document to a Mac OS X application, and have it spit out a pdf.

Thanks to Platypus, this was quite simple.

Where to get it

download:

MultiMarkdownDragAndDrop

What is it?

There are actually four applications:

\MultiMarkdown2XHTML - drop a (Multi)Markdown formatted text file, and it spits out an XHTML file. Simple enough, and you shouldn’t need to install anything else.
\MultiMarkdown2TeX - drop a MultiMarkdown formatted text file, and it spits out a LaTeX file. It makes use of SmartyPants and my xhtml2article XSLT transform (Markdown and XML). You can open up the application package and tweak the script the and the included Resources if you want to use a different flavor, or customize the XSLT. Easy to use, but the only problem you might have is that the version of xsltproc included with OS X is out of date - you might have errors when you generate a table. Install a newer version with Fink. Otherwise, very simple to install and use.
\MultiMarkdown2PDF - again, drop a MultiMarkdown formatted text file, and you get a LaTeX file AND a PDF. Again, SmartyPants and xhtml2article are used. Additionally I make use of latexmk by John Collins. I made a couple of minor changes to latexmk to allow it to find pdflatex and latex in the /sw/bin directory (where it is installed by Fink. If you did not install LaTeX via fink, you might have to edit the script. Use of this program also requires that you have all the required LaTeX packages installed. Definitely don’t try to use this program until you can properly create a pdf from the command line first. Not as simple to install, but just as simple to use once you have it working.
\MultiMarkdown2PDF Memoir - just like the PDF version, but uses the Memoir class rather than article.

How to install it

Simply drag and drop the applications you wish to use to wherever you want to keep them. You can also place them in the Dock, to allow quick access if you use them frequently.

Version History

2.0.a - updated to MultiMarkdown 2.0.a code base
1.0 - initial public release

Credits

Several projects were used to make this possible:

The GUI for this application was built using Platypus, written by Sveinbjorn Thordarson.
The conversion to XHTML is done using MultiMarkdown, written by me, which is an extension to Markdown, written by John Gruber.
This application also makes use of SmartyPants, written by John Gruber.
To convert from MultiMarkdown to LaTeX, I use some XSLT scripts, written by me.
To process the LaTeX into a pdf, I use the latexmk script by John Collins.