Marked 1.4 is go

Marked 1.4 is available on the Mac App Store. I’m announcing this a little prematurely; the press release doesn’t go out until tomorrow morning, but I’m just too excited to hold off.

There are quite a few new features, including Scrivener, Leanpub and mmd_merge support, as well as a syntax for including external files with full MultiMarkdown (or custom) processing. This means that you can create a single index file (multiple formats available) and have Marked generate a complete document preview (combining multiple files in the order specified in the index), while watching all of the included files at once.

You can also include external files anywhere in a normal document using simple syntax, and a slight variation of the syntax will include files as code blocks. Related: updated Github style, option to preserve line breaks, support for fenced code blocks and automatic syntax highlighting with language detection. Phew.

There are also print improvements, including the ability to force a page break arbitrarily or to create page breaks before h1 and/or h2 headers. Marked 1.4 can even scroll the preview to the point at which you’re editing in your document (I think I might have buried the lead there).

I updated the internal Markdown reference to include basic MultiMarkdown syntax, turned the help into an HTML-based system which exists outside of the Apple Help System, and updated the Quick Overview intro screen. It’s now awesome. If you’re not a new user and have already disabled that on startup, use Help->Quick Overview to revel in the CSS3 glory. That’s a bit dramatic, but it’s pretty cool.

This version is the first version of Marked that is Lion-only¹, and it takes advantage of several new tools in the OS for optimization and stability.

For the full list of new features and fixes, see the changelog. The full help system for Marked is available online now, too, if you’d like to explore. Then, of course, go upgrade (and update your reviews, please) or buy it if you haven’t yet! The Marked website just got a refresh as well, be sure to check it out.

Up next: I plan to fully incorporate Fountain in the next version (hopefully with Final Draft export), as well as the ability to watch an entire folder and display a preview of the most recently-edited file (perfect for nvALT and bookwriting). I’ve already added more text stats for the next version (1.5), including reading time, average syllables, unique word count and more.