markdown
The nerd implimentation of GTD is based on plain text-files, or more precisely
- all lists in text files, kept in directory
“~/Documents/txt”
- all documents maintained in Markdown for easy
HTML conversion
I’ve been writing HTML-code since the times that the best browser around was something called NCSA Mosaic so I’ve never paid too much attention to Markdown before. Here is its main purpose
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or >HTML). Thus, Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
An example of Markdown-code followed by its HTML-output can be seen at the BlueCloth website and I have to agree that the Markdown text is very legible. I’ve been playing around with Markdown for a couple of days now (in fact this post is written in Markdown as WordPress has a Markdown-plugin) and have found a few uses for it (more on this another time). Essential sites to visit if you want to learn some Markdown are : its basic syntax and in the rare cases that this doesn’t do what you want to do there is also a full syntax page.
If you want to use Markdown to write your HTML-pages you need to be able to convert Markdown to HTML (and conversely although the uses for this are not immediately clear, but there are plenty of good reasons!). That’s what the Markdown.pl Perl-script does for you (one way) and the Python-script html2text.py (to be found here) (the other way).
To get them working using BBedit all you have to do is to put them in the BBEdit Support/Unix Support/Unix Filters directory (to be found in the BBEdit-folder in /Applications). Then, if you have written a Markdown-text, do a Select All go to the !# menu and look for Markdown.pl under Unix Filters and voila, you have valid XHTML (the other direction is similar).
This is a bit of work and one would like to do both operations in nearly all Applications using the Services Menu (in fact, until a few weeks ago I had no clue that there was something as useful as this menu hidden under the program-name-menu of any Cocoa-program!). This is best done using HumaneText.service. The installation is really as siimple as they say on this page (although it took me a couple of trials before it worked, and I use the Services-menu rather than the keystroke-shortcuts).
HumaneText works perfectly with TextEdit, SubEthaEdit and (probably more important to mathematicians) TeXShop and iTeXMac (the two most common front-ends for (La)TeX under OS X). A noteworthy exception is BBEdit (hence the above laborious work-around). Sometimes there are problems with punctuation in the conversion but you can get around this using SmartyPants.