I’ve been working on a few updates to my Markdown to Sendy script that add some nice quality-of-life improvements for creating email campaigns. The main additions are support for greeting/salutation customization and a new button liquid tag that makes it easier to create styled call-to-action buttons. Greetings and Salutations The script now supports customizable greetings…
Tables in Markdown have always been a bit of a mess. Every processor handles them slightly differently, and when you start wanting advanced features like column spans or captions, you’re usually out of luck. I’ve been working on Apex, my unified Markdown processor, and I’m happy to say that tables are now pretty solid. The…
I’ve made a couple of improvements to md-fixup, the opinionated Markdown formatting and linting tool I shared this week. The main additions are better emphasis handling and link conversion options. Emphasis Handling By default, md-fixup normalizes bold markers to __ (double underscore) and italic markers to * (single asterisk). So **bold** becomes __bold__ and _italic_…
I have some strong opinions about how Markdown should look. Liberal line breaks everywhere. ATX headers with exactly one space after the #. Consistent list indentation using tabs. Tables that are properly aligned. And on and on. So I made Markdown Fixup (md-fixup). Building My Own Tool I just wanted a tool to fix my…
One of the things I love about Howzit is how it bridges the gap between simple task lists and full automation. You can write quick (or complex) scripts right in your build notes and, with the latest updates, they can communicate back to Howzit in useful ways. The latest updates make this even easier with…
I’ve been working on making Apex (my ultimate Markdown processor) easier to integrate into Xcode projects, and I’m excited to share what’s new. The biggest change is full Swift Package Manager (SPM) support, which makes adding Apex to your project as simple as clicking a button in Xcode. While Apex is still in a 0.x…
Apex has always supported Kramdown-style IAL (Inline Attribute Lists), but I’ve been steadily adding more Pandoc compatibility. The latest release brings several new features that make Apex work better with Pandoc-style markdown while maintaining backward compatibility. Thanks to somelinguist for the suggestions! Table Captions Get More Flexible Table captions now support three different formats. You…
Happy New Year! I spent some time this morning developing some features for Howzit that I think will be really useful (at least for me). Howzit is my tool for documenting my project structure/build/deploy/CI methods and instructions, with the ability to execute code from the Markdown documentation. I use it in every project I create,…
I’ve been working a bit more on mdtosendy, my Ruby script for converting Markdown to email-ready HTML, and recently added a multi-template system that makes it much more flexible for managing different email designs. To read more about the inspiration and initial development of mdtosendy, see the blog post I wrote a couple of days…
I’m excited to share that Apex version 0.1.41 has comprehensive support for Inline Attribute Lists (IALs), including inline IALs for span-level elements, key-value pairs, and Attribute List Definitions (ALDs). This brings Apex’s IAL support to full feature parity with Kramdown. In case you haven’t been keeping up, Apex is my universal Markdown processor project. The…