What I Use: Markdown (Premium)

A few years ago, I switched to a Markdown editor to simplify my writing workflow. And while I can't really recommend my personal approach to writing, there are now many excellent Markdown editors available, even for mainstream users.

So let's start with how and why I use Markdown. After publishing a few books ourselves, Rafael and I determined that we would need to work with some kind of online publisher when we moved forward to Windows 10 Field Guide. Our previous approach was too time-intensive, and Rafael, in particular, spent a lot of time handling customer service-type issues, especially related to billing.

We wanted no part of that. So for the most recent book, we did a bit of research, and Rafael came up with Leanpub, the online publisher we still use. Leanpub offers a number of benefits for self-publishers like us, but key among them are that they handle customer service (ostensibly; obviously most readers still contact me directly) and, more important, payment.

Leanpub isn't perfect. I assumed that I could continue writing with Microsoft Word, as I'd been doing since about 1993, since Word is the standard in the publishing world. Internally, Leanpub uses a markup language called Markdown, with a few proprietary language extensions required by the publishing process, to go from written word to published book. Markdown is plain text, with special codes, like XML or HTML.

Whatever. This is the type of thing a writer should never have to deal with. My expectation was that I'd write in Word, use some tool to "publish" the documents to the service, and that it would convert them into whatever back-end mumbo-jumbo it needed to make the book in various formats (PDF, ePub, and MOBI).

And that's how we started three years ago. But what we quickly found was that converting Word DOCX to a form of Markdown that Leanpub was difficult, and it required tons of manual fixes before the result was publish-ready. Rafael worked on ways to automate the process, but there were always little problems that crept into the text.

Finally, he asked me the inevitable question. Could I just write the book in Markdown?

I objected at first. I do have a developer background, had, in fact, written numerous books on developer topics over the years, and thus have some familiarity with the type of coding such a thing would require. But Rafael found an editor, which at the time, made sense, called MarkdownPad 2. This editor is designed for writers and coders, and it lets you use familiar keyboard shortcuts, like CTRL + I for italicize, to format text if you prefer doing that to writing code. Just like Microsoft Word.

What isn't just like Microsoft Word is that MarkdownPad 2, like most early, developer-oriented Markdown editors, utilizes a strange two-pane view in which the plain text you are writing appears on the left and the formatted, HTML-style text appears on the right so you can see the heading and other styles you're using and get a clear...

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