I really enjoyed this episode.
One minor correction, though, about iA Writer — it stores the files you make as .txt files in iCloud and not in some kind of proprietary library like Ulysses. It’s one of the main reasons I moved to iA Writer (well that and it being a one-time purchase and not subscription service).
You’d need to put Byword in “Preview” mode.
I enjoyed this episode and picked up a couple of handy tips, despite being a reasonably proficient Markdown user.
One thing that has always struck me about Markdown is that while there is a wealth of great editors as mentioned on the show, there seems to be a lack of easy to use tools for styling the output exactly the way you want (especially if you want printed output).
Most of the editors have a handful pre-built output styles, which are ok, but if you want to go beyond these then you quickly end up in the intricacies of CSS. This is a bit of a shame when you consider that one of the main aims of Markdown was to avoid the need to code in HTML.
It would be useful to know how people cope with this challenge and this might be a good topic for a follow up show. For example I know that Federico Viticci has said he has a custom iA Writer template to format its markdown output to look like his website. It would be interesting to know how this was created (last time I looked iA Writer templates were not for the faint hearted).
Also if anyone does have any good tips for user friendly tools in this space then it would be great to hear them.
I’m not a big Markdown user myself, but take a look at Brett Terpstra’s Marked 2 utility. He offers a free trial and I think it part of Setapp.
Code blocks might be a decent hack for use in a normal Markdown writing app, but I thought it was odd that David hacks code blocks for annotations while using Ulysses, because Ulysses offers
Comments/comment blocks are (typically for Ulysses) extremely customizable in their formatting, but their main advantage over code blocks is that they are normally excluded from printing, pdfs and export (unless you optionally export as ‘Rough Cut’). I make a lot of notes to myself in my writing and find this invaluable.
(I don’t use Ulysses’s annotation feature, as it hides annotations inside a pop-up which I find useless.)
Related to this, for several years writer Matt Gemmell has done all his writing in Ulysses and he has an interesting annotation-related technique I appropriated: For each document he creates a top level live-filter in the Library pane that matches documents which satisfy any of the following criteria:
For him this makes the editing process much easier, since he can see what’s still to be done, all in one place.
For decades I’d used the easily searchable ‘XXXX’ in my text mark spots that needed my attention but Gemmell’s supercharged filter puts all comments and needed editing in one place.
Thanks for bringing this up. I just searched and found some of Matt’s other posts you linked on another thread. I am excited to read those soon.
Here is the post containing the links that @bowline is referring to above: Transitioning from Scrivener to Ulysses
Marked was discussed quite a bit in the episode. It’s a great utility, I own it, but I rarely use it with Markdown because it’s really designed to enhance preview output for apps that have limited or poor preview/output. I just decided it was worth finalizing on an app which didn’t need that assistance (or take up double the screen real estate for live preview).
Marked is more interesting to me for use with mindmapping utilities like MindNode and iThoughtsX, in that you can link a mindmap to Marked, see it in outline form, and see edits live (then saved out in outline form).
I agree with @MotownDoc, although using Markdown seems interesting, it just seems like extra work for a user like me who is doing emails, document creation, etc. Keyboard shortcuts seem quicker. There isn’t exporting and no preview needed. What am I missing about using Markdown? Maybe it’s not about productivity, but rather about the enjoyment of writing in this language?
I agree that there is some enjoyment involved. But, it is also nice to know that my writing is saved as plain text files that are light weight and will not be held hostage by any proprietary software. I write blog posts in Markdown. Writing blog posts in markdown makes process much easier as I can just export the post to my platform and save the content as a plain text file. But, just like everything, using Markdown should be driven by its ability to help your workflow. If it doesn’t help. Do not use it. 
As the podcast discussed, when you’re working with text files you’re future-proofed and don’t have to worry about accessing defunct, changed or deprecated file formats in the future, you don’t have to worry about losing or screwing up formatting when copy/pasting into other documents, it reduces dependency on a single piece of software to read or write with, it’s easy to share, and it lets you convert easily (or more easily) to different types of sources (blogs, ebooks, email, PDF, html).
And it’s already used everywhere - when you’re using this site you’re using a Markdown editor
I always think of the [ and ] as the visual of a button and the ( ) as the note about what the button is (the link)
Thank you for that. What you said makes a lot of sense.
Thank you. That is helpful.
RTFs are a relatively stable format, no? you can open them in TextEdit and such.
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Personally i feel Markdown is a bit overrated. Besides writing online (for which Markdown is clearly the best tool), rich text isn’t bad either.
I’m not saying you should write in MS Word (which is totally “the cockpit of a fighter jet”
). That results in bloat and overwhelming numbers of options. But rich text writing environments like Scrivener (or even TextEdit. Books have been written in TextEdit.) are nice too, and shouldn’t automatically be discarded.
Try dragging-and-dropping rtf into different apps and see how well the formatting is preserved.
I realize this is a limitation of RTF; i have experienced it before.
Just write in the destination app, or use “copy and match formatting”.
I’m not saying MD is bad; I’m saying RTF is not bad either.
I’ve had so many problems with rtf compatibility over the years it’s a no-go for me.
For short, casual writing rtf is fine but for long-form writing that needs to be outputted it can be a mess. Markdown files will survive and be readable for practically ever and outlast every other format around.
Markdown is human-readable, and depending on the app used can be WYSIWYG. rtf format is not human-readable. Code-blocks are auto-recognized with Markdown, not easily with rtf. And Markdown offer such clarity that David (and Stephen?) said they use hashtags as headers when they write on paper. (I do too.)
There are always tradeoffs (tables are one pain-point) but overall I prefer a human-readable format I can write with in ANY app, and can be exported to anyone on any other computer system without worrying about formatting errors.
Stable? Yes.
Compatible? No.
IMO, RTF should basically die at this point. .doc files are probably a better choice for interoperability.
oh well. looks like I’m the only RTF lover here.
But I totally agree with what people have pointed out here, regarding Markdown. it’s a good syntax, but I do wish rtf was more… usable? for more people