Adding additional output formats for Markdown?

[Michel Fortin]

Le 27 juil. 2005, à 21:53, Fletcher T. Penney a écrit :


> For me, my dream for Markdown would be to use it as the default syntax 

> for most of my text-ish documents - weblogs, wiki pages, academic 

> papers, readme's for my software, etc.  A single Markdown document 

> would likely end up becoming a variety of different kinds of 

> documents, each of which would have a different means of specifying 

> the title, author, etc.


And what exactly is a *Markdown document*?

As you may have noticed, Markdown does not output HTML documents; this 
is not what it is meant to. It convert snippets of text that you can 
put in the middle of a template HTML page.

The same thing could apply to a Markdown-to-Latex converter: you 
convert Markdown headers to Latex headers and so on, then another 
program put it in inside a template Latex document. This way, people 
can choose the template they like, and give the metadata (if any) into 
that other program that build the final result.

Your metadata format is interesting, but I see no reason why you should 
merge the template program with the Markdown conversion program. They 
could both exist as separate entities. For example, your template 
program could read the metadata, then read the Markdown formatted 
content, call the Markdown-to-something-else converter over the content 
and output the document using the template, the converted content, and 
the metadata.

This way you have a separate Markdown converter usable in other 
environments where the metadata isn't stored the same way, like, say, 
Movable Type or Bloxsom. More than that: you have a separate 
metadata/template tool that could work with other syntaxes than 
Markdown provided there is a converter.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/