I'm a big fan of lightweight markup languages, popular with server-side blogging software such as Movable Type and Wordpress: they're perfect for writing Web pages, where you want mostly freeform text, and when formatted text controls sometimes get in your way more than they help. Since RapidWeaver uses a rich-text control for styling text that I just couldn't get used to, I wrote a little plugin named Markup so you can write in a markup language instead. It simply adds a Markup Language menu item below RapidWeaver's HTML menu item, where you can pick from a small but excellent set of markup languages, such as:
- John Gruber's Markdown (syntax),
- Textism and Brad Choate's Textile (syntax), and
- David Grudl's Texy (syntax).
For the UNIX wizards, you can also have bash markup: i.e. markup that's filtered through the UNIX /bin/bash shell that's installed on every Mac OS X computer. It can also add "smart" punctuation to your Web pages via SmartyPants, if you're one of those folks (like me) who appreciates seeing proper em-dashes, ellipses and open quotes.
There's a ton of improvements that I still have to make to it, but hey, something is better than nothing!
You can download the Markup plugin at the GitHub releases page, at https://github.com/andrep/rw-markup/releases.
Markup 0.16 may also even work with RapidWeaver 3.2 and Mac OS X 10.3.9, although that's not officially supported.
If you do find any bugs, just email me: I'll add it to my to- do list. Ditto for feature suggestions, for which I'm sure you have many ideas!
- You can use the
bashmarkup language to treat the markup text as a UNIX shell script, which will be run and have its standard output emitted. For instance, simply type inLast updated on date +'%A, %B %Y, %e'into any RapidWeaver styled text area, select the "date +'%A, %B %Y, %e'" bit, and choose thebashmarkup language from the Format -> Markup Language menu. Note that RapidWeaver 6+ runs inside a Sandbox. Keep this in mind if your bash commands expect to access data outside of RapidWeaver!
The source code is on GitHub, at https://github.com/andrep/rw-markup.
It seems that I'm not alone in wanting to add markup support for RapidWeaver. At least two other enterprising developers have their own markup-esque plugins available for RapidWeaver, which you may prefer:
- plessl's Markdown plugin (with accompanying source code--yeah for open source!). Note that plessl's plugin takes a different approach to mine: whereas plessl's Markdown plugin offers a new RapidWeaver page style, my Markup plugin enables you to use markup text in any RapidWeaver styled text area, such as the sidebar for each page.
- Loghound's PlusKit, which offers a slightly different approach to markup text (via explicit
<markdown>and</markdown>tags), and also does a lot more besides that (such as being to merge other page styles into the current page, ala Blocks 2).