My Markdown Workflows

Since I discovered Markdown, I have been implementing it in all of my writing workflows. Here are the workflows I use to write in Markdown for the web, for printing and for iOS apps.

• Mou for Mac. It provides an instant preview of your Markdown code, splitting your screen in two (markdown-instant HTML). It allows to insert your own CSS files to preview and export, both to HTML or PDF.

• iA Writer for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Stored on iCloud, edit text notes using Markdown, then export formatted text to HTML or send it directly by email.

• Adobe InDesign with MarkdownID. With this JavaScript script, Markdown styles that would be otherwise converted into HTML tags, are converted into InDesign Paragraph and Character Styles. Paragraph Styles are created as Text, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, Code, Blockquote, Lists, etc. and Character Styles create bold, italic, and typewriter formatting. Goodbye Microsoft Word.

• Says, my blogging system. Still a work-in-progress version, I added libraries to parse Markdown to HTML both in PHP and JavaScript. This provides an instant preview when writing on the web, and the ability to store Markdown text on the database, which can be used later for other purposes.

• MMMarkdown iOS. An Objective-C library to parse Markdown to HTML, which I have been using for my iOS applications.

• Laravel with vtalbot/markdown. It allows to use Markdown parse commands anywhere in your whole Laravel app. For example, parsing a string to HTML is as simple as follows:

Markdown::String('Hello, **world!**');
// returns '<p>Hello, <strong>world!</strong></p>'

If you found this post useful, please share it or tell me what you think. If you don’t know what Markdown is, I am pretty sure you can benefit from using it.