I have worked in publishing for 28 years, starting with HTML websites; then writing, designing and editing print magazines and other publications; and finally moving into online and disc-distributed multimedia publishing. My career has finally looped around and merged these various types of publishing through running a digital-focused publishing house.
I have used a lot of now-defunct software over the years—both Aldus and Adobe Pagemaker, Opus Creator, Macromedia Director, Macromedia and Adobe Flash, etc.—and, while publication design still requires proprietary software (primarily various Adobe and Affinity apps), I have become increasingly focused on creating materials in digital formats that will be accessible for years to come. This, along with the desire for simplicity when working with text documents, led to making Markdown central to my publishing workflow.
The Advantages of Working with Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language. Created in 2004 by John Gruber (and tested by Aaron Swartz), it is—in Gruber’s words—an “easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format” that can be converted to other text formats. While I use Ulysses for most of my writing (I’ve also been impressed with the open-source Zettlr app for scholarly writers), a Markdown file can be opened in almost any text editor and therefore is both highly archivable and accessible in most conceivable content-creation and publishing environments.
Working with plain text files, rather than a rich text file requiring a full word processor like Microsoft Word, also makes it easier to work with book-length documents. Because I republish out-of-print and long-forgotten books, a lot of my work starts with downloading a PDF scan of a book (when one exists) from the Internet Archive along with the Optical Character Recognition-created plain text version of the PDF. In past decades I would then open the text file in Word and begin laboriously correcting OCR errors and adding formatting to the text, grumbling as Word ran ever more slowly and increasingly crashed (particularly a problem in past years with the Mac version). Now, however, because I am working in plain text I can open the file in (the Mac-only) Textsoap to quickly correct common OCR errors, and then work on the file in a text editor that can easily handle a book-length file without problems (on the Mac I use a combination of Multimarkdown Composer and BBEdit).
As you can see from the example in the graphic above, Markdown is extremely easy to read, and therefore ideal for correcting typographic errors and adding formatting to raw text. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the plain text files are not locked into a proprietary software format and thus are available for use in a wide variety of apps.
Converting Markdown Files
The problem Markdown users can encounter at this point is that most publishing programs—and most readers—do not use or support Markdown, meaning you will need to convert the Markdown/plain text file into another format. This is easy when publishing on WordPress—I simply copy the Markdown text and paste it into the WordPress post—but can be more complex with print documents.
Fortunately, a number of Markdown apps will easily export Markdown files to other formats (for my purposes, primarily DOCX and PDF). Ulysses’ built-in exporter is excellent (as is iA Writer’s), and users can select a custom style for formatting the document. I have used Ulysses to write papers and articles for other readers and publishers, and have encountered no significant problems with the documents I’ve exported (the only problems I’ve encountered has been the handling of automated citations from Bookends and Zotero, which adds a level of complexity with which few people outside academia and the sciences will need to trouble themselves). The open-source app Zettlr includes the document converter Pandoc and was designed in part to process citations (which Ulysses emphatically was not).
Pandoc is vital for my workflow in converting the text of previously-published books into different formats. As I mentioned above, I use Multimarkdown Composer for correcting OCR errors and adding formatting to the plain text versions of old books (I created a custom styling theme that enables me to easily identify formatting changes in the document). Because Multimarkdown Composer doesn’t export to either DOCX or PDF, I open the completed document in BBEdit and use a script to process the file through Pandoc (which is installed separately) and create a DOCX file that can then be imported into a publication design app like inDesign.
Publication Design
Working with Markdown-formatted text, while central to my publishing workflow, isn’t the end point: the text still needs to be laid out and published. In another article I’ll describe how I use the Vellum ebook app to create digital books (and some open source alternatives).
