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You’re Doing That Wrong is a journal of various successes and failures by Dan Sturm.

Converting MultiMarkdown to HTML with TextExpander

If you’re here, reading this site, chances are pretty good that you use and love MultiMarkdown as much as I do. That, or you’re at least fairly curious and have a plenty of free time.

With more and more applications supporting Markdown natively, the need to convert the text to HTML is decreasing in frequency. However, the need isn’t completely gone. Sometimes you just need some good old fashioned HTML.

A Hammer For Every Season

(Or Some Other Metaphor That Actually Makes Sense)

There are almost as many ways to get your MultiMarkdown into HTML as there are applications that support Markdown.

I’ve created build systems for Sublime Text to convert MultiMarkdown documents to HTML files. I’ve got a build system that lets Marked do the heavy lifting for me. For the times I don’t need a full MultiMarkdown document, just a small snippet of text, I’ve got Brett Terpstra’s killer MultiMarkdown Service Tools.

It’s probably due to the myriad of tools at my disposal that I only recently discovered I’m unable to use Brett’s OS X Services in Sublime Text 2. I’ll admit, I didn’t try very hard, but after Control + Clicking, trying my keyboard shortcuts, and doing a bit of searching online, I quickly gave up and decided to build a tool I knew would work.

To TextExpander We Go!

When I need a system-wide tool that works in any application, activated by a few quick keys, the answer is almost always TextExpander. With its ability to act as an intermediary between text and scripts, TextExpander is the hammer that always gets the job done [1].

The snippet:

#!/bin/bash

pbpaste | /usr/local/bin/mmd

Just like my other text processing scripts, proper use involves selecting the text to be processed, copying it to the clipboard, and invoking the snippet, which I’ve bound to the command ;mmd. Now, any time I need to convert MultiMarkdown text into HTML, without the hassle of saving files and opening specific applications, I’ve got a quick, universal keyboard command I can use. Bringing me one step closer to an application agnostic workflow.

Hooray!

  1. Yes, I’m sticking with the hammer metaphor. I’m in too deep to turn back now.  ↩

Running Scripts with TextExpander

I love that the Internet is full of smart people making and sharing awesome things. Like Dr. Drang and his Tidying Markdown Reference Links script. Seth Brown’s formd is another great tool I don’t know how I ever lived without. But, being the amateur that I am, I always struggle to figure out just how to use the scripts these amazing programmers have been kind enough to provide.

Lucky for me (and you), I’m able to play along with the help of everyone’s favorite writing tool, TextExpander. In the documentation for formd, Seth was gracious enough to spell it out for us laypersons[1].


To run formd with TextExpander, simply place the Markdown text to convert onto the clipboard and issue the appropriate TextExpander shortcut (I use fr or fi for referenced or inline, respectively).

It took longer than I’d like to admit, but eventually I realized this snippet could be tweaked to run any script I happen to download from a coder more skilled than myself. Additionally, since most of the scripts I want to use are built for processing text, the copy/paste activation generally works great.

#!/bin/bash

pbpaste | python /Path/To/Your/Script/script.py

With this short snippet, I can copy my text to be processed, invoke the script snippet of my choosing, and have the results immediately pasted back into my text editor, email, or wherever.

This particular snippet assumes you’re running a python script, but you can just as easily swap python for ruby or perl. Or you can omit the python call if you’re just running a standard Bash command. As long as it’s a valid command that would run in the Terminal[2], you can automate it this way. And, just as with formd, to use the snippet, you simply Copy the text to be processed, and invoke the snippet.

Boom. Done. Life is grand.

While none of this is new or revolutionary, connecting the dots between TextExpander and the Terminal is something I wish I’d have discovered long ago and, therefore, may be of interest to you.

Of course none of this would be possible without the amazing minds that write the scripts in the first place. So, along with this post, I offer a sincere Thank You to Dr. Drang and his site And now it’s all this, as well as Seth Brown and his site Dr. Bunsen.

  1. Layfolk? Laypeople? Missing the point?  ↩

  2. And frankly, I just start trying things in the Terminal until I find the correct command.  ↩

Creating Linked Images with TextExpander

I have a TextExpander snippet for creating Markdown links. I have one for creating Markdown images. Both pull a URL from the clipboard.

On occasion I’ve used them in combination to create images that are linked to the, usually larger, original images. I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to create a single snippet to do this one task, but a recent project filled with high-rez images necessitated such a tool.

For this particular project, I’ve also used a fill variable to add a description to the image. Not rocket science, but just another tool to save myself a lot of time and frustration.

The Snippet:

[![%fill:description%](%clipboard) %fill:description%](%clipboard)

No More Excuses

In my continued quest to create a completely application independent writing workflow, I figured I’d share a tip that has helped my adoption of MultiMarkdown. This is a simple one, but it’s one of those things that may not be completely obvious to new users.

I still get blank stares of confusion from people when I try to explain MultiMarkdown and just how great it is for creating pretty much anything that includes words. I imagine the difficulty has something to do with new users not quite seeing the cost / benefit to completely overhauling their writing workflow. The Dropbox syncing and platform independence of text files are a great opening line for the sales pitch, but I think the features MultiMarkdown brings to the table are the real closers.

The primary reason I continue to favor MultiMarkdown over traditional Markdown is it’s implementation of document metadata. First off, I love that it creates a nice, neat header to all my files. It’s really the only way I can tell what I’m looking at as I quickly fly through files with the ‘Goto Anything’ feature in Sublime Text 2.

But since I’m attempting to replace all of my writing tasks with MultiMarkdown, the most important metadata feature for me is the CSS key. I can quickly link to different CSS files to create the type of output I’m looking for. I have a standard CSS file for writing on my site, one for converting MultiMarkdown documents screenplays, and most recently I’ve created one that outputs something akin to a slide presentation [1], to remove the need for horrible presentation software that will not be named here.

Now, since I’m a good nerd, I use TextExpander to take care of the heavy lifting of the MultiMarkdown header syntax. When I open a new text file, I use the snippet ‘mmeta’ to trigger the following:

Title:                 %|
Author:             Dan Sturm
Date:                 %snippet:ddate%
Keywords:
CSS:                    http://dansturm.com/ds_doc.css

I now have a date stamped file, linked to my default CSS, ready to for me to add a title and any relevant keywords. If I’m writing a screenplay instead of a web post, all I have to do is change ‘http://dansturm.com/ds_doc.css’ to ‘http://dansturm.com/ds_script.css’. And soon, it’ll be just as simple to switch between web posts, screenplays, and slide presentations.

I like using CSS to modify the output of my simple MultiMarkdown documents. I don’t need to learn a different syntax for each type of file I want to create. With a couple hours of tweaking and testing, I can create additional CSS files for nearly any output I may deem useful. And this is all in addition to the obvious benefit of using basic MultiMarkdown and simple CSS to keep my amateur brain from exploding.

Yes this is all very basic stuff, I know. My point is this; when creating a properly formatted document, in any style you desire, requires as little effort as typing ‘mmeta’, there’s really no excuse for using a word processor, screenplay writing application, or slideshow application.

I hope this will help you make the leap to using MultiMarkdown full time in your own writing. I can’t begin to explain how much I love and rely on it every day.

  1. Post coming soon.  ↩