Since leaving Oracle I’ve been hard at work on Marked 3, and holy cow it’s a huge update.
I expect to have the beta out in the next week or two. When it’s ready it will be available as a subscription directly via Paddle or the Mac App Store, and all Setapp users will get it as part of their subscription.
There’s a new website up at markedapp.com, though none of download links will work. Soon, though.
I decided to go with subscription pricing because I want to support continuous development. I haven’t charged an upgrade price for almost a decade, so people who paid $10 for the app 10 years ago have gotten all of the improvements for free for years. That’s not sustainable for me, and subscriptions mean I don’t have to release a new app every year, but rather just constantly improve on it.
Here are some of the highlights that I think make Marked 3 worth paying for. (Marked 2 will continue to function but won’t get any more updates.)
The new Custom Rules setup replaces the old Custom Preprocessor and Custom Processor settings. The old way only allowed one of each, and your only option was to manually enable it or disable it. Now you can have multiple processors that activate automatically based on criterium like file extension, metadata type, or even content detected in the document (regex available!).
I’ve added CommonMark (with GFM extensions) as a default processor, which brings full compatibility with other apps that use CommonMark, such as Bear.
I also added Kramdown, my personal favorite processor. It’s 99% compatible with MultiMarkdown syntax, and its major draw for me is IALs, a special syntax that can apply CSS classes to any element.
Marked 2’s DOCX export was terrible. It basically just output rich text content into a DOCX container, with no structural information. I’ve completely rewritten the DOCX export from the ground up. Not only can Marked 3 output perfect DOCX files with a variety of styling options, it can also open most DOCX files and export them to other formats.
<mark> tag with appropriate background colorBecause the export settings are so vast, I’ve added “Export Profiles.” These allow you to save current settings as a profile, making it easy to switch between settings at export time. Every type of export has a dropdown in the save dialog for selecting a profile. You can use it for something as simple as setting a different header logo for different contexts, or for completely different export settings like page margins, markdown link styles, and anything else that affects any of the export formats.
As part of setting this up, I refactored all of the export code to allow for future automation (AppleScript, Shortcuts). Previously Marked couldn’t bypass the Save dialog, and all of the export functionality was tied to callbacks. Now it’s separate and can be called externally. I’m partially finished with AppleScript support for things like tell app "Marked" to export markdown to PATH with profile "Work". Still working out the syntax and I’ve run into some showstoppers on that, but once I get this release out I’ll get back to working on that. All of this will also be applied to Shortcuts actions and the URL handler.
Marked used to rely on the macOS print system to generate PDFs, which is basically the same as opening an HTML file in Safari and printing to PDF (with a few niceties like customizable headers and footers). I completely rewrote this in Marked 3, which builds the PDF manually, allowing for much more control.
Experiment with Marked’s different built-in processors and see live rendering of both source code and web preview.
Load any web page you like the look of and replicate its styling as a Marked Custom Style. The Style Stealer window accepts a URL, preferably an article/post page with plenty of content, and allows you to hover and click on the main content area of the page. It will grab the styles for existing elements and inject and read any that are missing, getting their computed style (the result of all CSS applied to the page).
It even does a decent job of grabbing custom fonts, including Google Web Fonts.
I might as well stick the rest of the changelog in here… there will almost definitely be more to add by the time the final release is ready, but I’m one step away from beta, so this is a pretty complete list.
<mark> not being properly handled by MultiMarkdownmetadata document in Scrivener binder as document metadata
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on GitHub, Mastodon, and elsewhere.
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