Publishable or Published?

[Lasar Liepins]

Good day.

This is my first post to this list, so I will introduce myself quickly. 
I'm Lasar Liepins from Germany, currently an application developer in 
training, doing web-based projects (mostly PHP) on the side. I've 
stumbled across Markdown recently and find it a very fine replacement 
for the similar (but vastly inferior) markup systems I've built for my 
own projects. And I've started marking up my plain text files in 
Markdown too, even when I have no plans to publish the files as HTML.. 
Anyway, on to the topic at hand.

On 17. Feb 2005, at 05:50 Uhr, Jonathan Ploudre wrote:

> I have to say that I think Markdown may eventually be used for things 
> besides HTML and plain text.
> [..]

I agree. For example I use a relatively simple PHP/MySQL-based system 
to manage documents I write. Currently I use my own very simple markup 
style which translates to PDF through the [FPDF library] [1].

[1]: http://www.fpdf.org/

Instead of using my own little system I would like to see some way to 
"hook into" the Markdown parser, which would tell my own code "this 
should be bold" or "leave this alone, it's HTML", and my code could 
then translate this to the commands needed for my PDF libary, write the 
RTF data or anything else. I haven't looked into the Markdown code 
(neither Perl nor PHP) yet, so maybe this is already easily possible.

Of course this approach would "break" as soon as it encounters a file 
containing actual HTML code next to the Markdown code since it would 
not translate to PDF display or anything else (unless I implement a 
full HTML parser). But other than that I really see no conflict with 
the original Markdown purpose (plain text translatable to HTML). Same 
approach, different output.

Another approach of course would be to have a HTML parser translate the 
Markdown-generated HTML to PDF or RTF or something else. If somebody 
knows of something in that direction (preferrably PHP or Perl or at 
least something system-independent), I'd be very happy too.

Greetings,

_Lasar

P.S.: And If I haven't made myself clear: I love Markdown. Thanks to 
everybody who worked/works on it.

-- 
_Lasar Liepins                     0: http://liepins.net/
  lasar at liepins.de                  1: http://liepins.de/
                                    n: http://w42.de/
Nur was nicht ist, ist möglich. (Einstuerzende Neubauten)