MultiMarkdown, or MMD, is a tool to help turn minimally marked-up plain text into well formatted documents, including HTML, PDF (by way of LaTeX), OPML, or OpenDocument (specifically, Flat OpenDocument or ‘.fodt’, which can in turn be converted into RTF, Microsoft Word, or virtually any other word-processing format).
MMD is a superset of the Markdown syntax, originally created by John Gruber. It adds multiple syntax features (tables, footnotes, and citations, to name a few), in addition to the various output formats listed above (Markdown only creates HTML). Additionally, it builds in “smart” typography for various languages (proper left- and right-sided quotes, for example).
MultiMarkdown started as a Perl script, which was modified from the original Markdown.pl.
MultiMarkdown v3 (aka ‘peg-multimarkdown’) was based on John MacFarlane’s peg-markdown. It used a parsing expression grammar (PEG), and was written in C in order to compile on almost any operating system. Thanks to work by Daniel Jalkut, MMD v3 was built so that it didn’t have any external library requirements.
MultiMarkdown v4 is basically a complete rewrite of v3. It uses the same basic PEG for parsing (Multi)Markdown text, but otherwise is almost completely rebuilt:
The code is designed to be easier to maintain — it’s divided into separate files on a more logical structure
All memory leaks (to my knowledge) have been fixed
[greg] is used instead of [peg/leg] to create the parser — this allows the parser to be thread-safe
The [test suite] has been modified to account for several improvements. MMD should fail one of the basic Markdown tests (see peg-markdown for more information). Currently it fails one of the LaTeX tests — this is not intentional and I am working on a fix.
Command line options are slightly different.
For another description of what MultiMarkdown is, you can also check out a PDF slide show that describes and demonstrates how MultiMarkdown can be used.
Why should I use MultiMarkdown?
Writing with MultiMarkdown allows you to separate the content and structure of your document from the formatting. You focus on the actual writing, without having to worry about making the styles of your chapter headers match, or ensuring the proper spacing between paragraphs. And with a little forethought, a single plain text document can easily be converted into multiple output formats without having to rewrite the entire thing or format it by hand. Even better, you don’t have to write in “computer-ese” to create well formatted HTML or LaTeX commands. You just write, MultiMarkdown takes care of the rest.
MMD Editors. What is mmd. MultiMarkdown. Introduction to MultiMarkdown-4. Introduction As the world goes multi-platform with all of the new mobile operating systems, MultiMarkdown provides an easy way to share formatting between all of my devices. It’s easy to learn (even for us mortals) and immediately useful. — David Sparks, MacSparky.com What is Markdown? To understand what MultiMarkdown is, you first should be familiar with Markdown. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. What is MultiMarkdown? Markdown is great, but it lacked a few features that would allow it to work with documents, rather than just pieces of a web page. I wrote MultiMarkdown in order to leverage Markdown’s syntax, but to extend it to work with complete documents that could ultimately be converted from text into other formats, including complete HTML documents, LaTeX, PDF, ODF, or even (shudder) Microsoft Word documents.
In addition to the ability to work with complete documents and conversion to other formats, the Markdown syntax was lacking a few other things. Fletcher/MMD-Support. MultiMarkdown. “As the world goes multi-platform with all of the new mobile operating systems, MultiMarkdown provides an easy way to share formatting between all of my devices. It’s easy to learn (even for us mortals) and immediately useful.” — David Sparks, MacSparky.com “Personally, it’s changed my game — it’s how I think now.
Can’t imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn’t do MMD.” — Merlin Mann, kung fu grippe What is MultiMarkdown? MultiMarkdown, or MMD, is a tool to help turn minimally marked-up plain text into well formatted documents, including HTML, PDF (by way of LaTeX), OPML, or OpenDocument (specifically, Flat OpenDocument or ‘.fodt’, which can in turn be converted into RTF, Microsoft Word, or virtually any other word-processing format). MMD is a superset of the Markdown syntax, originally created by John Gruber.
MultiMarkdown started as a Perl script, which was modified from the original Markdown.pl. MultiMarkdown v4 is basically a complete rewrite of v3. You simply write: Installation. Installation You have several options for obtaining and installing MultiMarkdown: Binary installer – available for: Mac OSWindowsUse a third party package installer: homebrew for Mac OSCompile from source – useful if you want to modify MMD’s behavior, or if there isn’t an available binary download for your operating system Mac OS Installer You can download the installers from the MMD website download page. If you use older tools that were designed for MultiMarkdown version 3, you may need to use the Mac Support Installer. If you plan on creating LaTeX documents, you should also download the LaTeX Support Files and install them into the appropriate location for your system and LaTeX software.
Homebrew You can use homebrew to install: brew install multimarkdown Or, if you want the latest updates between releases: brew install --HEAD multimarkdown (Note: I use the --HEAD version on my own machine.) MacPorts MacPorts has a package for MultiMarkdown: sudo port install multimarkdown *nix Windows Free BSD. How to Use MultiMarkdown. There are several ways to use MultiMarkdown, depending on your needs. You can use the multimarkdown command line tool, you can use MultiMarkdown with several applications that support it directly, or you can use a drag and drop approach. Command Line Usage First, verify that you have properly installed MultiMarkdown: multimarkdown -v If you don’t see a message telling you which version of MultiMarkdown is installed, check out Troubleshooting.
To learn more about the command line options to MultiMarkdown: multimarkdown -h Once you have properly installed MultiMarkdown: multimarkdown file.txt will convert the plain text file file.txt into HTML output. Multimarkdown file.txt > file.html A shortcut to this is to use MultiMarkdown’s batch mode, which will save the output to the same base filename that is input, with the extension .html (or .tex for LaTeX output): multimarkdown -b file.txt A benefit of batch mode is that you can process multiple files at once: multimarkdown -t latex file.txt For LyX: or: or. Jgm/peg-markdown.