This week I finally sat down and spend some time with Markdown input and output. Both saw major changes. Markdown input was bumped to upstream version 2.0. Output was completely rewritten from scratch. Markdown output is now completely custom code (not using a third party output module like before). I based the new markdown code off of the Textile output classes I helped Perkin to create. As with all new code and major changes there are probably bugs....
About Formatting Tips. Up to this point Formatting Tips have been focused on the EPUB format and working directly with the underlying XHTML and CSS. Not everyone wants or needs this level of control over the layout of their book. Often times a book only needs basic formatting such as headings, bold, and italic. There are other easier ways to format an ebook. However, in this case simpler does mean basic....
I’ve become active in contributing to calibre again. So far I’ve been focusing on fixing issues related to the output formats I maintain. I’ve been focusing on FB2 and TXT output at the moment. With FB2 output my goals were to fix as many bugs with it as possible and to produce 100% valid output. The first goal corresponds nicely to the second because most of the open bugs dealt with invalid markup....
For the past three weeks I’ve been working on an editor for working with plain text files and making it easy to add markdown syntax to them. My main goal is to make it easier to format the large number of ebooks I have. Almost all of them are plain text files. It’s a python project using PyQt4 and I’m hosting it on Launchpad. here is the project page and you can find some screen shots here....