As I wrote here, I am giving iA Writer one more try as my default writing app.
I have run into a perplexing problem that I’m hoping the hive mind can resolve. I do not know if this is an inherent issue with markdown or if it is specific to iA Writer.
If I indent a paragraph using CMD + ] or the tab key, the whole paragraph is not displayed in preview mode.
Is that little area with the lorem ipsum capable of being side-scrolled? Just wondering if the text is THERE, but in a weird side-scroll thing, or whether it’s being truncated.
I may have found the problem. I had the preview template set to GitHub (I like the look). When I changed it to other templates, the text previewed correctly in PDF and web-rendering formats. It appears to be a GitHub-specific rendering issue.
This is a Markdown issue (combined with a styling issue). When you indent the paragraph, Markdown sees it as a code block (as it should). Specifically, it sees it as a code block of one very long line of text.
It would seem that the CSS styles for the “github” style has text wrap set differently for code blocks than the other options. It could be argued that the “github” style is more correct, albeit less intuitive.
(EDIT TO ADD: This reply was meant to be directed at @Bmosbacker.)
When you use Markdown, you have wandered into the territory of software developers, code jockeys, plain text nerds, and Mac geeks.
There are better tools for people who just want to write and be able to share well-formatted text – that is, text that looks like it was printed in a book, a professional journal, or a classy magazine.
You need a real word processor, if not an actual desktop publishing system!
I just tested this in Obsidian and I get the same result. So, it would seem that I can’t indent text in a markdown editor and have it render correctly. That will not work for me because I often need to indent text.
You need a real word processor, if not an actual desktop publishing system!
@karlnyhus I don’t know if you were intending to reply to me or @waylan but I have been using Pages for a lot of my work.
Unless there is a frictionless way to avoid creating a code block when intending paragraphs, I’ll have to conclude that markdown is not going to serve me well, hence, my experiment using iA Writer as my default writing app may be very short-lived.
I’m a little unclear what you mean by indenting here… Do you mean you just want the entire paragraph to be indented by a set amount to make it stand out?
In that case, you normally use the ‘block quote’ feature, not code blocks – just add a chevron > to the beginning of each paragraph. How it will look depends on the CSS template being used, but in iA Writer, the Modern Sans template is fairly clear and simple.
# Example
## Committee Members
> NOTE: START of Latin Text: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Cum saepe nesciunt sed voluptatum molestiae sit quisquam illum aut illum labore sit voluptas quia aut aperiam dolores ea officiis velit! Et provident deserunt qui aliquam aliquid ea adipisci beatae sed voluptas molestiae et omnis cupiditate. END OF LATIN TEXT
The rest of the text.
gives this in iA Writer with the Modern (Sans) template.
This is bog standard Markdown syntax so it will work in any editor / previewer.
Sorry if I’m misunderstanding something!
I think the confusion arises because one way of invoking a code block is by indenting a paragraph by four spaces – iA Writer has assigned a shortcut to this. Personally, I prefer the other method, which is to encase the code paragraph in triple backticks. You can turn iA Writer’s confusing behaviour off in Settings > Editor > Indentation and changing the Tab key to Inserts tab, not Indents.
Sorry, I did mean to reply to you, @Bmosbacker, as you once again have returned to Markdown and tried to make it work for you. I’m at a loss as to why you do this periodically when it seems obvious to me that the tools for working with Markdown are unsuited to your needs.
Yes, I mean indent the entire paragraph. I use > all the time, but I’ve always reserved it for actual quotes (which I typically have several). Indents are intended to set a paragraph apart for special attention.
[quote=“karlnyhus, post:10, topic:38432”]
it seems obvious to me that the tools for working with Markdown are unsuited to your needs.[/quote]
You may be right and I may be making things harder on myself than needed. The reasons I’m periodically tempted back to markdown are:
The files are much smaller, which over time can matter
In principle, I like the idea of my work being highly portable and I especially like the ability to bulk export and or convert files markdown files to other formats
The writing can be faster
But, as you imply, I may be just creating unnecessary work for myself.
To me, the purpose of the > is to bring any paragraph, not just quotations, to the reader’s attention by indenting, and that’s normally how it’s used on webpages. You can tell it’s a quotation because you give the source, not because it’s indented.
But that’s up to you of course! In any case, code blocks aren’t really meant for this situation.
Markdown is not suited to this. As the creator of Markdown explains (emphasis in original):
The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself.
Setting a paragraph apart for special attention is a publishing thing, not a writing thing and therefore beyond the scope of Markdown. Yes, it is true that various tools have expanded Markdown to give it some publishing features, but those are always nonstandard and vary from tool to tool. The original creator of Markdown assumed that the author already knows and understands HTML and can just fall back to raw HTML for publishing based formatting. In fact, the few lines right before the above quote include:
Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert.
What we learn from this is that the author of a Markdown document is expected to have a technical understanding of HTML. Personally, I do and when I am writing in Markdown I am thinking about how I want the HTML to render and format my Markdown accordingly. However, whenever I see someone struggling with Markdown, almost inevitably, they do not understand the HTML that the Markdown renders to. If that’s you, then Markdown is probably not the right tool for you.
True, but surely irrelevant in the case of block quotes, which are in the original Markdown specification, and which are used to express the writer’s intention for that paragraph, which is to make that paragraph stand out from the normal format. Otherwise your strictures would apply to Headers and other basic Markdown formatting, and would mean that no-one who didn’t fully understand HTML could ever use it, which I think is going too far.
Thank @waylan for your excellent description of what Markdown is and is not suited for. It never hurts to go back to what Markdown’s inventor had in mind when he was just trying to make it easier to post his blog to the web.
Well, this may explain part of my problem; I know nothing about writing in HTML, and though I like to think I’m a lifelong learner, I have no interest in HTML.
That said, apps like Ulysses handle indentions well but use proprietary markdown. I like Ulysses a lot, but I have lost data, and so have others, so I am leery.
Markdown is fantastic for quickly writing notes. For dashing off a quick email where you might need a bulleted list and a heading or two. It’s lousy for fancy formatting.
Heck, even HTML is lousy for fancy formatting until you add CSS. Possibly because it wasn’t ever really intended for fancy formatting.
There are other markup languages that really let you get fine-grained control over publication-ready documents, such as LaTeX. I agree with @karlnyhus that it looks like you’re trying to shove a Microsoft-Word-shaped peg into an iA-Writer-shaped hole. Or vice-versa.
ETA:
If you’re fine with proprietary formats and the risk of losing your data, you can just use Word. You know that, right?
