First-time user woes

[Waylan Limberg]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:17 PM, Duke Normandin <dukeofperl at ml1.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 4 Mar 2011, David Kendal wrote:

>

>> On 4 Mar 2011, at 17:26, Duke Normandin <dukeofperl at ml1.net> wrote:

>>

>> > Should I be redirecting the output to a file, like:

>> >

>> > markdown --html4tags convert-this.txt > convert-this.html

>>

>> Yes.

>

> Cool! Thanks. BTW, does it say as much in the Markdown site? Am I

> blind in one eye, and can't see WAS out of the other? :)

>


Markdown outputs to 'stdout', which implies that basic command line
constructs will work. I imagine that if you're calling markdown from
the command line, it is assumed you know and understand this. However,
if the docs nowhere say markdown outputs to stdout, then that may be
an oversight.

On the other hand, markdown is generally considered a library first
and a command line script second. In other words, it is primarily
meant to be called from other code (cgi script, web framework, etc)
and the command line feature is a helpful afterthought. That means
documentation of the command line features may suffer a little. In my
personal observation, this applies to all the various implementations,
although some are better than others.

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Waylan Limberg