🖊️ Scrivener and Markdown 📝
Since we’re on the topic of Markdown, let’s not forget that Scrivener, my absolute favorite writing tool, can handle Markdown no problem. No, it doesn’t have a preview button, nor does it have buttons or menu choices for adding the Markdown tags. You actually don’t need them.
Write and format your document as you normally would, with bold, italic, citations, and tables, and then export the document to Markdown. That formatting gets converted to the correct Markdown codes.
From the Scrivener website:
This takes a rich text document and converts it all to MultiMarkdown syntax: bold, italics, footnotes, tables, lists, block quotes—the works.
…simply tick a checkbox and have all of the rich text converted to MultiMarkdown during export.
Markdown is part of the “Compile” function rather than the Export function you see on File – Export.
Once in the Compile dialog, select the “Compile for:” option, and MultiMarkdown are displayed, along with a few variants.
Under the Formats section, select Basic MultiMarkdown.
When complete, you get an .md file you can load into another editor for final composition like MWeb, or Marked 2.
This puts Scrivener on par with MonsterWriter, another writing tool I’ve messed with, that’s built for writing research papers in Markdown.
Of course, since Markdown are text tags, you can add them inline and they get rendered by whatever engine you drop them into. Scrivener won’t render/preview the blocks as you type, but it obviously supports the characters.
As an example, you can render a block of code using the 3 back tick marks: (“`). Or within Scrivener, you can surround that same block of text with the Code Block formatting style. On Export, they will both render as a code block in MWeb. If you know the codes add, if not, let Scrivener do it.
This adds to the power and flexibility of Scrivener. Write your document as normal, then let Scrivener do the heavy lifting of converting it to Markdown. Format once and use it in multiple places.
Markdown editors are great, but technically, any editor is a Markdown editor. With the Markdown export in Scrivener, you can format your document visually, and get the correct Markdown codes when you’re done.
Markdown is another benefit of using Scrivener. No need to change editors or switching writing environments for another format.
