may I ask what is better with Marked 2 compared to the DTP viewer that can be customized with a stylesheet? I am just wondering why a third party app is necessary.
The main differences (afaik) are that Marked2 shows changes in the MD file in real-time and that it follows the view in the editor, i.e. the rendered part is synchronized with the edited part. And that CSS is slightly better integrated in Marked2.
But I never did really get the appeal of it, since it can only be used to view, not to edit.
Not sure when/why other psople use it but I think Marked 2 is particularly useful when you are selecting or tweaking a new style sheet.
For me that only happens once or twice a year when I need to design a document for a new project or new event. But I can imagine some people like graphic designers do that multiple times per day.
With Marked 2 it is super easy to switch among different sylesheets so you or family or client etc can compare options.
Iāve only been using Marked2 for a few weeks but this is what has been most apparent to me in that time.
I think of Marked 2 like a port hole or a glass bottom boat. If thereās one document I am working on and I am dealing with a bunch of other documents and completely separate tasks, the Marked 2 window is always there to show me the latest version of the doc I am working on. I can have multiple docs in DT open for any number of reasons, switching back to DT after collecting info or dealing with other issues in other apps or in other databases of DT means I wonāt always have the main doc in the foreground.
Another good thing about Marked 2 is it acts like this for any text editing scenario. Itās a bit niche but the ability of Marked 2 to render .fountain scripts was the clincher. Store the raw text in DT, view and print in Marked 2. Perfect. Also great for sharing one screen in zoom writing meetings. Nobody needs to see the chaos of my desktop and clumsy typing, just the rendered script as I make changes suggested in the meeting.
If youāll forgive me overextending another metaphor, DT is, amongst many other good things, a very powerful Swiss Army knife (journals, document manager, receipt tracker, project management aid, email archive, search engine for all of the above) but like a Swiss Army knife, you canāt have all the tools open at once.
For instance:
- I use LogSeq for task management but everything links back to DT for docs and emails.
- Marked 2 is new on the scene for me but itās very handy for keeping the editing progress of an important doc foremost in my attention (it lives on the left 2/3rds of my leftmost monitor).
Interesting
Is there any practical use case for .fountain scripts other than screenplays?
I donāt think so. It is specifically for that purpose. It works like a variation on Markdown but more focused on one type of end product.
It helps that there is some enough standardization in the screenplay world that itās even possible. Final Draft is the de facto standard in many areas of the industry but many people bristle at the cost of keeping it updated to work on collaborative projects and integrating it with production planning software. The things FD does that arenāt basic word processing and formatting are what make it useful on big projects. Versioning, tracking changes, connecting to all production and post-production departments for what they need. The MS Word-like bloat is there for some good reasons.
There are lots of attempts out there to make it more open and fountain was one of them. If you just need to write a script and deal with all that other stuff later fountain is a good place to start.
Iāve done basic first drafts in DevonThink on my phone and used Editorial (long abandoned but still works!) to format and send out PDFs.
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I use Marked2 with multiple markdown editors. I use it to ensure that as I am creating my markdown it displays correctly. It is a well made tool that specializes MD and will continue to do so. As I mentioned many editors that are good at displaying and editing MD also offer the ability to stream a preview out to Markdown2.
I agree that DT does a good job. But I donāt need DevonThink to do a great job, because I have access Marked2 and it does MD.
All I asked for was a āsimpleā (caveat: I have worked in and managed software projects long enough to know that nothing is ever, really, āsimpleā) UI change, that I thought would benefit people who were heavy MD users, and not impoverish anybody. From a users perspective this was a friction free change, that improved DT for those people who get to the point where their use of MD outgrows DTās preview.
