Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Code Highlighting Changes

The preceding post marks a change in how code will be highlighted on this blog, now being based on Google's client side code highlighting library. What I'm using follows what Luka Marinko describes.

Overall, I think the result is decent, but not quite as nice as what I was doing before. But it's so much easier that I'm willing to provisionally accept the new look.

Markdown in Marked script

I've lately been experimenting with writing in MultiMarkdown (MMD) format. As a whole, it's quite pleasant, but it seems best suited for documents that require some formatting, but not much formal notation. That's not the sort of writing I most often do; LaTeX remains my main writing tool.

Still, MMD is a nice option at times, and has at least one significant advantage over LaTeX: it is lightweight both in its processing and in its writing, so it is easy to do on any computer. On my Macs, I'm using SubEthaEdit (SEE) to compose and have just purchased Marked to preview. Marked is quite a nice design, intended to work with any editor (in proper Unix philosophy!) and automatically updating the preview whenever the document is saved (pleasantly reminiscent of Latexmk, albeit with a much easier task). Marked is also inexpensive (three bucks!) through the Mac App Store. Unfortunately, Marked 1.1 seems to be a little buggy, but its author has said that he's already fixed the bugs I reported, with the updated version waiting to finish the review process.

While already a pretty elegant combination, I present below a script to streamline the combination of SEE and Marked a little more. You'll need to install the Markdown mode for SEE. Show the package contents and save the script below into the Scripts folder within. While you're there, throw away the silly rot13 script that is included in the mode for some inexplicable reason. Reload modes in SEE, and you'll have a command that opens the current (Multi)Markdown document in Marked.

Amusingly, I inadvertently tried typing several things in this post using Markdown syntax (which Blogger doesn't use). It's very natural!


tell application "SubEthaEdit"
if not (exists path of front document) then
error "You have to save the document first"
end if
set docpath to the path of the front document
end tell

set mdFile to POSIX file docpath
ignoring application responses
tell application "Marked" to open mdFile
end ignoring

on seescriptsettings()
return {
displayName:"Preview with Marked",
shortDisplayName:"Preview",
keyboardShortcut:"@O",
toolbarIcon:"ToolbarIconRun",
inDefaultToolbar:"yes",
toolbarTooltip:"Preview current document with Marked",
inContextMenu:"no"
}
end seescriptsettings


Edit: Made a minor change to the script. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the original form would hang on some files (naturally, none I tested before posting about it!), with SubEthaEdit waiting for a response from Marked. The ignoring application responses takes care of that.