Using Nova for writing a book in markdown or markua?

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1

Hi there totally,
new here.

Already using Nova for php, html, js editing. But also as a FTP client.
Works perfectly.

I’m planning to use nova for writing my next book on markdown (markua ideally) to match Leanpub platform’s requirements.

Do you have a workflow?
Markua or markdown syntax coloring?
More wysiwyg features like making a text bold by clicking and it creates the markdown?

Thanks in advance.
Julien

2

This forum is more for extension/theme development questions, but speaking as someone who writes an awful lot of non-code prose in Markdown, I’m not sure Nova—or any code-centric editor—will be able to beat an editor specifically tuned for prose-centric Markdown editing, like iA Writer or Ulysses. Having said that, Nova will definitely work well with Leanpub’s workflow, and you can easily make a split tab preview in real-time for editing purposes. But I don’t think there’s any easy way currently to make it more “word processor”-ish.

3

I write a popular blog and it’s all Markdown with YAML front matter (metadata), source control, all from within Nova.

Depending on your formatting needs and preview requirements I’d also say you’ll be hard pressed to beat dedicated markdown tools (Ulysses being the best IMHO, but there are many).

Do you have a workflow?

I’ve created several plugins to make working with Markdown more pleasant. Such as a plugin for adding hyperlinks that requires no typing of any Markdown. There are also Markdown Snippets.

Markua or markdown syntax coloring?

Markdown has its own syntax highlighter. The markup is still visible but text effects books and italic are applied. Whether it aligns with your expectations is the question. It’s a far cry from Ulysses, etc.

There isn’t Marklua support but it would be fairly easy to add for somebody motivated enough. One of the many developers on this board. But I’d recommend only doing it after you’re comfortable with the Markdown experience in Nova, as it won’t be much different to that.

I’d be up for adding Marklua support and/or improvements as an extension, but it would need to be paid work as I’m an independent developer.

More wysiwyg features like making a text bold by clicking and it creates the markdown?

You can select text and press the bold or italics key and the Markdown markup will be inserted around it. They will be previewed to a degree as explained earlier.

4

Hi @gingerbeardman @chipotle and thanks for your answers.

Ok for the dev thing.
Ok for the extension etc.

Is there another forum more user oriented ?
For instance, I started the book as nova is with a md extension that’s very enough. And I’d love to see the preview of my picture in the preview split screen. Because the path relative and not the same as the one required by leanpub , I don’t see them. Probably in my “project” I should do something ?

5

There’s Reddit and Discord for more general discussion. Sorry I don’t have links to hand!

For my preview split I use a web server to process the files, which does many things including image path transformation. That can be set up though the Project Run/Build option.