Thought you might be interested in Marked 2–while it’s Mac only (not a problem for me), it provides some of the multi-file and prose oriented tools I was looking for in an app that is designed to work with other editors. It’s also MultiMarkdown rather than git-flavored Markdown, but it seems to recognize most of the Deepdwn example file formatting, sans diagrams, ABC, and the like. I’m just trying it out and will let you know how it works.
kt
To maintain the tree-like structure, it would need to change the heading level (and possibly later headings as well), or would move (possibly large) sections of text around without changing the header level at all, and I don’t think either of these feel natural in a markdown document.
Yeah—I figured it would be nontrivial to implement. MS does a decent job of it in Word, although very few people know how to use it.
Folding only affects the document view itself, rather than the outline.
Thanks for the tip—I was trying to use the shortcut keys and getting nowhwere. Is that documentation inaccurate, or am I just missing something?
Can you talk about your specific workflow there? Where would your outline come from?
One way of representing a mind map is as an outline, although this misses things like non-hierarchical connections between branches. OPML is a markup language that allows sharing at least the hierarchical organization of a mind map as an outline, between different apps. I can export OPML from MindNode or SimpleMind and read it into Scrivener as a document structure or Word as a multilevel list.
Scrivener is the only app I’ve found that will read OPML and turn it into header levels, which is how most apps I’ve seen implement real document outlines or structures—it’s very similar to an ordered or unordered list, but the formatting and outline processing features are completely different. I’ve searched, and there is no way to move between the two in Word natively—you have to purchase a plugin or add-on for Word or do outboard processing. Since multi-level headings actually allow you to create an overall document structure, TOC, etc., those are what I’m interested in. Lists are helpful, but only within larger portions of text.
I’ve seen posts from others who want to convert from lists to document headings, but programs that actually do this seem to be as rare as hen’s teeth, likely because so few people know that outline processing exists in Word (or other apps), much less how to use it. It also leans heavily on styles, which very people know how to use at all, let alone use well. My design background is that I was the geek in a design studio, and I used styles heavily in Quark Express to make setting lots of text easier and more consistent, as well as easier to change across an entire document by updating the style.
Markdown and HTML 3 and higher explicitly use functional tagging rather than typographical tagging, although you can still tag text as bold and italic rather than strong and emphasized. The advantage to functional tagging is that you are marking how text functions in a document—as a header, caption, or footnote, rather than large and bold or small and italic. If you want to change all the level 2 headers, you just update the style sheet rather than doing a search and replace on all instances of a particular kind of formatting. Good web designers understand this intuitively now, because we’ve been using CSS for so long. Markdown doesn’t care what font face or size or spacing you use for a level 2 header–it’s just a level 2 header, and the style sheet determines how it will look. Changing which style sheet you use can drastically change the look and even structure of a document in just a few clicks, where that would have taken hours or days of work previously. And long documents, like books or bibles, can be formatted with very little human intervention, so long as they are tagged properly. Any website that renders well on a desktop screen and mobile phone relies on this same concept.
Anyway, I suspect this is pretty natural to you, at least if you were born after about 1990—it’s just how things are done now, at least for web formatting. I still see horrible things in Word. It appeals to my geekish sense of order and my love of automating repetitive processes so people can do the fun stuff. I’ve worked in IT in some fashion since the mid-80s with a heavy dose of design in the 90s, and this stuff combines the two. I haven’t worked as a programmer, except simple scripting, so I’m less familiar with how Markdown is used in, say, technical documentation or the ins and outs of git (little geek humor there).
Do that all make sense?
kt
Hi—new to DeepDwn, geek but not developer (mostly IT support). I heard about Markdown ages ago when I read the original Daring Fireball post but hadn't realized how it had grown over the intervening years. I was reintroduced to it by Ulysses and Speare, because I was looking for apps to help my break down writing into manageable chunks (I'm writing-phobic) and to move from mind maps to text documents. In that vein, I have some questions and/or requests.
DeepDwn seems to be aimed at developers and geeks (I mean, the vim and emacs modes are a bit of a giveaway). Given that, an outline processor may not be the highest priority, but the lovely outline pane seems to cry out for it. That, and the new(ish) Fountain support would seem to be aimed at creatives and Scrivener refugees more than developers.
Regardless of whether these features are implemented, I can see DeepDwn being useful in technical documentation, especially since there is (some) Markdown support in ServiceNow (our ticketing system), and I have been writing quite a few knowledge articles. Having a solid, cross platform Markdown editor will be very helpful.
Yep--there are lots of tune book apps, and some of those will aggregate tunes into printed or PDF books with a TOC and index. I was just thinking Deepdwn might provide more flexibility, but as you say, it's really a Markdown editor at heart. It would be great for writing text with musical examples, which I'm guessing is closer the the original purpose for including ABC.
ABC is similar to Markdown, in that there are a proliferation of extensions and roughly a jillion apps that generate everything from butt-ugly screen rendering to LaTex or MusicXML output suitable for professional printing; hence, I'm not surprised my wonky formatting didn't work. Returning to standard ABC fixed it.
My other reason for asking is that I've been working with apps like Ulysses and Scrivener to convert my mind maps into actual documents via OPML export-import (Ulysses works especially well with MindNode, although I prefer SimpleMind). For a writing-phobic geek like me, the ability to break text down into manageable bits is a game changer, and text cards are a big part of that. Well integrated outlining comes close, which is why I decided to try Deepdwn--I need to get comfortable with outline folding, as this accomplishes much the same thing.
The drawback to Ulysses is that it uses wonky Markdown, although the integrated environment and tools make up for that if one is willing to stay there. One can hope that they will allow editing in more standard Markdown in future versions--there is a Markdown option for external files, but even that has nonstandard behavior around paragraph breaks. If I can get comfortable working with Deepdwn, that will allow greater portability of my files between it and other Markdown based apps.
Thanks,
Ken Tryon
Here is an example:
```abc
T:Ned Of The Hill
R:waltz
M:3/4
L:1/8
K:Gmaj
%%clef bass
B,,A,,|{F,,}G,,2 E,,3 F,,|G,,4 {B,,}G,,A,,|B,,2 G,3 F,|E,4 E,2|D,4 B,,A,,|G,,4 A,,B,,|C,3 B,, A,,G,,|E,,4 B,,A,,|
```
As I recall, there are extensions to the ABC format, and commands beginning with %%, like %%clef, are some of those. I changed the syntax to
K:Gmaj clef=tenor
and it formatted as expected, even for the somewhat unusual (for anyone but a cellist) tenor clef.
Thanks for the tip!
On a related note, is it possible to include external Markdown or ABC files by reference? For instance, if I have a folder of tunes in ABC files, can I build a book from them by including them in a master document rather than copying and pasting the ABC text into the master? This would be a much cleaner way of maintaining a large library, although I know some ABC implementations basically concatenate lots of tunes into one big text file.
Just starting out with Deepdwn, having used Ulysses for a bit and been familiar with Markdown for ages. Version 0.39.0 on Mac.
I've been playing traditional music for about five years, and ABC is really common in that community. I'm also trying to find good tools to update a local session's songbook, so I nearly peed my pants when I saw Deepdwn supported ABC, albeit with limitations. My specific question is that I play cello, and the clef command is critical for me, because I need to transposes tunes into my octave. I have been looking at Markdown editors primarily for text editing (I also use mind maps a lot), but if I could use a Markdown tool for a songbook, so much the better.
Are there any plans to beef up ABC support? The clef command would be wonderful, as would some of the more advanced formatting commands. I can use Easy ABC to created PDFs, but the ability to put ABC inline in my text would be fabulous.
Guess that's more of a request than a question, but hey.
Thanks