/iA-Writer-Export

A Mac service which adds additional PDF export functionality to iA Writer

Primary LanguageShell

iA Writer Export

Discontinuation Notice

The iA Writer Export service is no longer being actively developed because I switched from iA Writer to Ulysses III, which is really the best Markdown editor for Mac OS X. Ulysses does support PDF export but not (yet) using Latex. I might need that functionality later this year and in that case I would develop another Mac service for Ulysses.

Please note that the development of this service was not finished and you may encounter several errors when using it.

If you are a developer, you like this project and you'd like to become a maintainer of this repository, feel free to contact me.

What is it?

The iA Writer Export is a Mac service which allows exporting Markdown files written in iA Writer to Latex PDF documents using a great document format convertor library called Pandoc.

Installation

  1. Install Pandoc (version >1.9) using a package installer listed on the Pandoc's installation page.
  2. Install a Latex distribution if you haven't pdflatex installed yet. You can check it out by writing which pdflatex into your Terminal.
  3. Download this iA Writer Export service and move it to ~/Library/Services.
  4. Optionally you can set a shortcut for the export menu item. How to do this is described in the last section of this article.

Usage

Your Markdown file has to be saved on your hard drive before exporting. For exporting to PDF select iA Writer > Services > Export Markdown to PDF in the menu (see the screenshot above) and wait until a new Preview window with the exported PDF file appears. It will be saved in the same location as the Markdown file with different file extension (.pdf). This is also the case for iCloud documents which is a little inconvenient.

Pandoc and iA Writer Export support more than iA Writer does. Check out the Pandoc's Markdown. Use links, source code highlighting, footnotes, images, tables, definitions, math equations, raw Latex, citations and more.