Scribes and markdown

Scribes logo

There’s a new kid in town. Well, not quite new, but haven’t seen it around for a while.

Scribes is an editor, providing functionality like Tex-Mate from Mac on Linux.

I’ve been using it now for a couple of weeks and more and more it starts to replace my gedit editor. Mostly because of the autosave-feature, but also because I don’t have to bother with anything else while writing.

Markdown

To implement markdown support for your files you have to do two things:

  • Install the markdown template

  • Name your files with the right extension (obviously)

Installing Markdown template

Currently Markdown isn’t supported by delivery for Scribes. But Scribes is using the GTKSourceView for the Syntax Highlighting. So you have to push that support into that system instead.

Information you find easily yourself and on the Scribes Support pages.

In easy steps:

  1. Download the latest version of gedit-markdown.

  2. Copy the file markdown.lang and/or markdown-extra.lang int the gtksourceview directory;

$ sudo cp markdown.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/
$ sudo cp markdown-extra.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/
$ sudo cp markdown.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/
$ sudo cp markdown-extra.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/

  1. Restart Scribes

Alternatively you can also install the support for the syntax to gedit. That way you can use gedit (which has a Plugin for that as well) with markdown-syntax support.

File name extension

There’s seems to be a kind of controversy going on about the extension. As usual, consensus seems to be a foreign word. So currently it seems to be that these are more or less supported file extensions:

.markdown
.mdown
.mkdn
.md
.mkd
.mdwn
.mdtxt
.mdtext
.text

There are pros and cons for most of them. For me working with Scribes the ending .markdown works best. Looks a bit weird having such a long one, but: HEY! it works!!!

Markdown to PDF

Sometimes you want to send a readable document to somebody else who’s reluctantly ignoring any progress of developing. So you send them a PDF. That makes sure, that

  1. They don’t complain about text-files which contain too much information and too less design.

  2. They can’t change the information. Who knows what they are capable of, if they can’t even read a text-file?

Easy, simple and quick using pandoc:

$ sudo apt-get install pandoc # Installation
$ pandoc -o outputfile.pdf inputfile.markdown

Then you’re done.