548: Jumping Into Markdown

Episodes
124

There is no such thing as fonts in Markdown. It does not matter what font you are using. Fonts become interesting when you export stuff from Markdown to a different file format like PDF, Word or similar file types. Markdown is the base for later exports. How stuff looks like depends on the templates that are being used for outputting from Markdown to other file types like Word and so on.

Apart from that, fonts in Markdown are just for your viewing pleasure when writing in Markdown or editing Markdown. If you are using tables in Markdown (GitHub Flavored Markdown or Markdown Extra) the table source code can be more legible with a monospaced font.

1 Like
125

I am aware that in your earlier reply, you know the benefit of Markdown (md). Just want to tell more about why font don’t matter for markdown.

Markdown is just a plain text, and the app that edit the md file adjust the interface’s styling as your likings. Some apps will apply as little as possible styling (iA Writer), while some apps lets you have the preview (Ulysses, Bear) or WYSIWYG (Typora).

In the end, the file in which your text data resides is in plain text format. The extension is file name.md, but if you change the extension to file name.txt, you can open it in TextEdit or Notepad (windows).

Using plaint text formats (.txt, .md, and for script/program .html, .js, .sh) guarantee that the data you have can be opened with any “plain text editor app”.

In contrary, Ms Word’s or Pages.app’s data files basically are container of many directories of files. If you change file name.docx or file name.pages to file name.txt, you’ll get nonsense texts if you open it in TextEdit or Notepad. This means, you’d need specific software that can handle those specifics extensions to be able to view/extract your data.

126

One footnote on “fonts don’t matter with Markdown”:

You could (and I actually do) code CSS in your Markdown file: Then you can style eg headings. In my case I do 2 things with CSS;

  • Put a line above a heading - to simulate a slide boundary.
  • Colour span elements.

(The second parallels metadata in md2pptx with the same effect.)

The point is that when everyone says Markdown doesn’t care about fonts that’s right. But you can make it care - on rendering.

2 Likes
127

You mentioned plugins. Suspect you are aware of Jetpack that has setting to enable Markdown. There are several apps that publish directly to a WordPress site using Markdown . I use Ulysses to do this. First cut goes into Ulysses (words, images, block quotes…) then I use the old-style WP editor to create the final product.

1 Like