I wanted to thank RealMac, and also Isaiah at YourHead, for including Markdown capability into the new versions of RapidWeaver and Stacks. I never use the Markdown page, but as I understand it Isaiah was able to relatively easily develop the Markdown stack because Markdown was “baked in” to RW.
I would estimate this added feature saves me about 25% in time. It’s truly amazing. It’s not sexy, but anything that makes content creation and publishing easier/faster is a friend of mine!
Many thanks Isaiah and the RealMac time for making my life easier and more enjoyable.
If you don’t use Markdown? It really is fab. It was developed around 2003 by John Gruber. He stated he was “too lazy” to learn HTML, so he developed a much more intuitive alternative. Here’s one article that might help you out (but there are several other good ones you can find): http://brettterpstra.com/2011/08/31/why-markdown-a-two-minute-explanation/
@robbeattie: As I understand it, the answer is “No”. There are special features that are included in Multimarkdown: footnotes, tables, cross references, and other things. These are not handled in regular markdown. It would be lovely if some (or all) Multimarkdown features could be brought into Markdown (either RW or Stacks).
@robbeattie: While Stacks was in beta testing Isaiah (@isaiah ) wrote in response to one query:
In the future I could see Stacks doing its own Markdown parsing (it’s not especially difficult) – but for now I think maintaining one-to-one perfect compatibility with the built in RW behaviors is a little more important.
Now that Stacks 3 is out you might want to direct message him. I think adding Multimarkdown features (cross-refs, footnotes, tables) would be fantastic. I think he already knows this from me, but probably good if he knew it would be useful to others.
I made this very point on the old forum. I also raised it with Joe Workman, who had the only means of putting Markdown in Rapidweaver at the time. Apparently he had a conversation with Fletcher Penney about MultiMarkdown. There was too much needed to make it viable at the time. I guess that Markdown is a bit more mainstream in Rapidweaver now.