Two Apps To Use if You Work in Markdown

I do almost all of my writing in Markdown, a lightweight and human-friendly markup language used for formatting plain text. Created in 2004, it uses simple punctuation and characters to denote headers, links, emphasis, code blocks, lists and other styles. Markdown is often used for writing README files, documentation, or content for websites. The language was designed for easy reading and writing. One issue with Markdown is that it must be rendered before it looks ready for mass consumption, including printing. Another issue is converting text into other formats, like .docx and .rtf.

There are plenty of tools for those who use Markdown. For creating documents, I often use Obsidian or MarkEdit, both of which are free. Obsidian is a hugely powerful app that has over 2000 plugins and can be overly complicated for some. It's also an electron app that some people avoid for that reason.

Marked 2

My recommendation to render and print Markdown files is Marked 2 by the great Mac developer, blogger and podcaster, Brett Terpstra. Marked 2 works with many different flavors of Markdown and is really great for developers writing GitHub documentation because it is capable of handling fenced code blocks, line break preservation and automatic hyperlinking. You can even get a spelling and grammar checker through IAP for Marked 2. It works with Obsidian, Scrivener, Ulysses, MarsEdit, Highland 2, iThoughtsX, MindNode, and other third-party apps. Aside from rendering and printing, Marked 2 also has impressive exporting features natively, including:

• PDF (continuous or paginated)
• RTF
• RTFD
• DOC
• DOCX
• ODT
• OPML

Marked 2 is not an editor. It only renders files.

Texts

If you want a WYSIWYG editor for Markdown with considerable exporting features, you can use Texts, a free app. Texts has great table support. What makes Texts special is its ability to import (and convert to Markdown) DOCX, OPML, HTML and LaTeX. It supports the same export formats as Marked and also adds

• HTML
• HTML Presentations
• EPUB2
• EPUB3
• XeLaTex

You can also print from Texts.