I use multimarkdown for my notes in Devonthink and it is an incredibly useful addition.
Table formatting in “Best Alternative” view yields a much larger font size than the rest of the document. Is there a way to customize it to the same as the document font size? Thanks!
DEVONthink’s markdown implementation does not yet allow us to point to our own stylesheets. This would be a useful addition.
In the meanwhile, it is possible to include link-relative HTML pointers to stylesheets available on the internet. For example, include this statement at the front of your markdown (in code view not in rendered view) and you will get a different result than what the (as yet unchangeable) built-in DEVONthink styling delivers:
<link href="http://kevinburke.bitbucket.org/markdowncss/markdown.css" rel="stylesheet"></link>
Thank you, that indeed works beautifully.
But I do not seem to get it to work with local files using the following syntax:
<link href="file:///path/to/file/mmdformats.css" rel="stylesheet"></link>
Should be (double, not triple back slash):
<link href="file://path/to/file/mmdformats.css" rel="stylesheet"></link>
What you can do with this is to create a markdown document with just this line of code. Use File > Export > As Template… to save this to the DEVONthink templates folder. Then, you can use Data > New From Template… each time you want your own markdown file with a call to your local stylesheet.
Thanks for the great tip - odd though, triple back slash works for me in the href but double back slash doesn’t.
Anyway, this is great - by choosing a generic name for the css file in the link, like current-markdown.css, I can change the style in files that contain the link by simply duplicating a new style and renaming the duplicate as current-markdown.css. By using Keyboard Maestro I can simply bring up a menu and select from all alternative styles listed and let KM do the work in updating current-markdown.css to the new selected style.
There are several conflicting RFCs that touch on “file:” URIs and it’s confusing. Supposedly “file:///” should be a localhost path and “file://” should be a network path, but differences occur – try the one that works on your machine.
It would be great if the markdown parser in DEVONthink would recognize x-devonthink-item: links for CSS, so we could keep a CSS library in a database and invoke different stylesheets in our markdown documents.
I like @khw’s extended view of using disposable css files – I’ll have to play with that. @khw don’t forget that these are “cascading” stylesheets and so you can have a structure where master styles are invoked (also by referencing) inside other sheets.
I think a more stable solution would be for DEVONthink to have a property for each document where we could declare a CSS location for that document. This could be set either in Show Info, or by script – preferably both.
Triple slash (for localhost) working fine here now – provided that the css is correctly set up wellwell. Safari also handles triple slashes for local files just fine. Thanks for the very useful advice.
Just stumbled on this post while hunting for a similar solution in devonthink to go 2.x and happy to confirm it works like a charm. But surely there must be a less ad hoc solution to styling md in devonthink to go? Opening this up a bit to used defined style sheets would make an already terrific app (and dt to go has resurrected my use of dt after I abandoned dt to go 1.x) even more useful. I think it is only fair to say that the current style sheet is basically unusable. Ugly fonts, tiny size and little styling… Perhaps a good intermediate solution would be to modify the clipping that does md via readability from webpages? I’d be curious to know if anyone else has tried this, or has a favourite stylesheet.
I agree Korm, that round tripping is preferred for editing, but what I’m talking about here is a reading use case, and here most of the good md editors are not ideal as they are made for writers (and I’m taking specifically here of platforms like 1writer, ia writer, editorial, byword, Ulysses etc. Which I use on a regular basis). I’ve found markdown to be the superior format for archiving web pages, blogs etc. In devonthink particularly because the md+readability workflow is so space efficient - much better than PDFs or web archives.
And I’m not sure you have the day re: this being an obscure feature request. Look at all the markdown editors for iOS and macos and the major builds all have style sheeting capabilities because style sheets are fundamental to the concept of markdown and multi markdown. So if we’re just talking about people who use markdown regularly, not obscure at all…
Is anyone able to share their CSS file for this use case with the group?