Hacker News Reader

Comment by DidYaWipe | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with Markdown is the baffling lack of plain VIEWERS. Not editors with a preview pane, but straight-up viewers that render Markdown for reading.

There are very, very few. I use Marked 2, for Mac. I don't even remember if I ever found another one. It's irritating as hell, because pretty much every open-source project's read-me files are in Markdown. Why, when there is no viewer anywhere near as ubiquitous as those for PDF... despite Markdown being much simpler and better understood?

View on HN

Makefile-driven development. Run "make pdf" as needed (looped in a shell one-liner if you prefer, or driven by an event watcher). A decent PDF viewer will either reload the document automatically on change or can be readily reloaded. The Suckless PDF viewer zathura is among the former, I've also used, variously, xpdf (slightly grungy these days but an old reliable) or MacOS's Viewer app.

<https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/>

This lets you work on the doc in a terminal window and have the (reasonably constantly updated) formatted output in a PDF viewer.

Short documents will render virtually instantly. I've not had long renders until documents extend to at least several chapters worth of text if not book-length, and even then it's a matter of a few seconds in most cases. Highly-formatted texts may of course take longer.

Why should you have to make a PDF? It would be even easier to have a live Markdown-editing window with preview... or better, just a WYSIWYG Markdown editor.

You can substitute whatever output endpoint you'd prefer, e.g., ePub, HTML, etc., if PDFs don't satisfy your personal itch.

I happen to generally be aiming for PDF output, it's among the more complex to produce, and still runs pretty much without concern even on very large documents. Anything else would be even more trivial.

Agreed. I use QLMarkdown [0] for preview in Finder and this markdown-viewer extension [1] for in-browser preview. But a standalone, native app would be pretty nice too.

[0] https://github.com/sbarex/QLMarkdown

[1] https://github.com/simov/markdown-viewer

Thanks. Try Marked; it is exactly what I wanted. It's $14, but I decided to reward whoever did what apparently no one else (including me) can be bothered to do.

I have tried MarkText, which is yet another editor with a viewer but it's free.

I use Markdown Viewer, in Chrome: I'd bet there are multiple equivalents in Firefox and Safari. Well. I don't know what Safari's extension universe is like but it seems likely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com