Tag: ulysses

So this happened. The new upload to WordPress export option. Because this is a beta release, and I’m not doing a full review because feature will be added and bugs will get fixed. In the meantime, I do have a few observations. It pulled in the wrong display name (that’s from an unused locked blog) but otherwise works the same as my upload script except links open in the same window instead of a new one.

Out of all the different forms of writing, the one that I’ve never explored was screenwriting. I’m not sure why. I think it has to do with it being a “foreign country” as compared to prose. At first glance the format seems intimidating. The strange margins and overall unfamiliar use of capitalization and line breaks disoriented me. I first started deciphering this when I created “Fake Fountain” for Ulysses. I’m not sure what my inspiration was.

After a recent feature request I decided to look into adding category support for my Ulysses-Post-to-WP script. In the end it was actually easy. It involved changing one variable from post-tag to category. The hard part was finding out that was the needed change. The documentation isn’t very clear, and I had to pull a post out via XML-RPC to see the format. The testing and writing up the changes took more time than the actual change.

There’s an old tech-support joke about important data. Tech: Does this drive have important data on it? Customer: Thanks for asking, it does indeed. Tech: Good. I’ll erase it now. Customer: Nooo! I’ll loose everything! Tech: If it’s that important, you’ll have a backup. Customer: What’s a backup? In short, if it’s on a computer and it’s important, there should always be a backup. We’ve gotten better about this. Dropbox was the first service to really break through the noise about backups.

I think the most important but often overlooked aspect of the adoption of Markdown is how plain text has made a comeback. There are many Markdown variation and flavors. Most are still used for Markdown’s original purpose—turning text into HTML. But one project has built on the idea of markdown and is using plain text to fill a different need. The Fountain project has created a plain text format that is designed for print (or PDF).

Note: there is now a GitHub repository for this project. Get the latest code there, including a downloadable Automator app  After sleeping on this I decided there were a few things I could do better. Having to put raw source in the document was annoying. I looked into several ways to do this, but found Ulysses had the answer. If a line of text is “marked” in Ulysses (that’s the :: notation) it gets exported as its own paragraph, but no other HTML tags are applied.

Note: I’ve updated this app, and you can find out more info in the updated article. Plus it’s even easier to install and set up. Or go directly to the GitHub repository for this project. Ulysses does a lot of things right as a writing tool. But it’s not designed to be a HTML or Markdown editor. It’s also not able to post directly to a blog. But its export friendly nature makes it easy to build helper apps.

I do all my writing in Ulysses. I also like to keep all of my files in its library. Since I started using it, the idea of having individual files scattered about my computer is just plain barbaric. The cost of this trade off is that if Ulysses doesn’t support a feature, I have to add raw HTML into the files. Normally this isn’t much of a problem. A bit HTML set off with ~~ isn’t distracting.

We have been looking forward to this day just as much as many of you. Our inboxes have been flooded in recent weeks by people asking us to stop teasing and finally announce a release date. Thank you all for your excitement, here is your answer. § Yay! As it stands in the beta version, exported ePubs will validate.

This morning I received an email from the Ulysses developers about the ePub bugs I reported. One thing that surpised me was a request to update my script that fixes the playOrder incrementing. One thing that came to my mind: since you already developed a small Ruby script, could you integrate the unzip and zip process within the script, so users wouldn't need this extra step anymore? — Götz So I did!