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Markdown everywhere
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 14, 2012 at 11:19 PM
I’m moving towards a more compact setup of software for my writing, borrowing several concepts and tips from people in this forum, as well as the Cyborganize process. My main goal is to maintain disturbance-free, focus facilitating environments for writing (WriteMonkey, Resophnotes) and editing texts (Brainstorm, Sense), as well as flexible repositories for organising the end products of various such procedures (ConnectedText, Dokuwiki)
Within this context, plain text is a powerful ally, with its ability to work as a universal format for exchanging texts among my applications, as pointed out in the past http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/10506
However, plain text is, well plain, which is not ideal when one is not writing continuous texts as in fiction, but rather more technical documents with bullets, emphasis and links. Of course, one could use HTML, but then s/he would be programming, not writing.
Markdown to the rescue; this interesting “un-markup” language http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ combines the best of two worlds by allowing texts to be marked in an intuitive and human-readable manner, which can directly convert to HTML. As an example, the following Markdown will produce a level-3 heading, a title in bold and a bulleted list. How much simpler can it get?
### ESSENTIAL SOFTWARE ###
__Office__
* Brainstorm
* Resophnotes + Simplenotes sync |
* TextPad
* WriteMonkey
I was positively surprised by the support to Markdown: from the software mentioned earlier, ResophNotes, WriteMonkey and Dokuwiki will all understand Markdown (the latter with the help of a plugin). The ones that don’t will not be bothered by it, so I can use it anyway.
Now if it were only supported as an alternative markup in ConnectedText…
Posted by JBfrom
Apr 15, 2012 at 02:45 AM
Nicely done, Alex.
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 9, 2013 at 10:44 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>I was positively surprised by the support to Markdown: from the software
>mentioned earlier, ResophNotes, WriteMonkey and Dokuwiki will all
>understand Markdown (the latter with the help of a plugin). The ones
>that don’t will not be bothered by it, so I can use it anyway.
Is there actually a hierarchical outliner out there for Windows (or online) that can convert Markdown into an outline based on the headings? I’m writing my text in Markdown in Gingko, but it would be good if I could paste the Markdown text (or its HTML version) into an outliner and the headings would be recognised and the text could be rearranged accordingly.
I could probably export the Markdown from Gingko as HTML, paste into Word, save as RTF, then import into Outline 4D, and do the rearranging there, but that’s just too many steps (though I could do that at the end with the complete text).
At the moment I just wanted a quick visualisation of the overall structure of the developing text, and then maybe promote or demote certain sections and adjust my original accordingly in Gingko.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 15, 2016 at 12:53 AM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
I’m moving towards a more compact setup of software for my writing,
>borrowing several concepts and tips from people in this forum, as well
>as the Cyborganize process. My main goal is to maintain
>disturbance-free, focus facilitating environments for writing
>(WriteMonkey, Resophnotes) and editing texts (Brainstorm, Sense), as
>well as flexible repositories for organising the end products of various
>such procedures (ConnectedText, Dokuwiki)
Alexander,
If you’re still reading this, how did you get on with Cyborganize? I’m also curious what sort of workflow and toolchain you ended up with.
I have recently stumbled upon Cyborganize again and decided to review it more closely, as it does seem to contain some interesting ideas, though I’m not sure I’d want to use the same tools as suggested by Joseph.
What set me off was that I decided to reinstall Brainstorm and compare it with WorkFlowy, to see if there is anything I’m missing from not using Brainstorm.
I never got the hang of Brainstorm, but I’m intrigued by the fact that it forces you to focus on a single hierarchical level of detail, rather than on the outline itself. I’m just wondering if that is a specific type of cognitive operation that might be useful to cultivate (within Cyborganize or otherwise).
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 3, 2018 at 09:07 PM
There are some good links to various Markdown resources in this article:
“Online Markdown Converter For Open Educational Resources”
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/omcoer/64822