Anyone have a good markup (markdown) editor for Windows? I want something to make it easier to generate user guides with images than typing in Writer or other word processor. I’m kind of looking at Sphinx since it has export options to things like PDF and epub and seems to install (via python) on Windows.
Are there other better and hopefully semi wysiwyg editors I should be looking at?
Obsidian is a good choice. it has PDF export, not sure about epub though.
Obsidian is very popular. Joplin is also great as a note taking app in Markdown. (I use Joplin). Both can be extended through plugins for all sorts of things.
I believe both have native PDF export and can export epub through plugins.
It looks like Obsidian is a web based system, I’d prefer having something locally operated. But lots of plugins for it, didn’t see a specific epub export, but did see a Kindle export plugin.
I looked very briefly at Joplin, the one good thing that came from their pages was the Mark down Guide Book for $5usd.
Obsidian is a locally installed app https://obsidian.md/ available for all popular operating systems. It is far more popular than Joplin.
I’ll dig deeper on obsidian, there were a few plugins that looked useful to my use case. Yes I scrolled the entire list to see what I could see.
I have it loaded up and spent a few hours editing screen captures and putting words to pictures. Easy enough for simple # heading and ## chapter headings. Drag and drop images is nice, really speeds that up. Going to need some code snippets in the next section.
Output is still a concern, splitting into pages being the issue. I saw some community plugins that might help for pdf.
Themes for the win, found a nice dark but not black theme that doesn’t hurt my old eyes. Still lots to learn and adapt.
It is a bit of a learning curve but imo well worth it. Once you go the Markdown route you’ll likely want it everywhere, i.e. static website builders with MD input, etc.
Mixed results with exports. There is a PDF preview community plugin that helps you (sort of) see the PDF before you render it, but no way to go through and put smarter page breaks in while doing this.
I found a project called Pandoc, it allows export to many different flavors including epub. Then you need one of the community plugins that hooks into Pandoc from Obsidian. The resulting export needs formatting work, pretty much the same as a pdf. The big issue is images, I’m getting a lot of white space due to how many of these screen caps will fit on one page. Not a problem if you have enough text between, but if you have a sequence of images, with or without short text between, you get lots of white space.
I think I need To set a scale on images so I can at least get 2 on a “page”, I say scale because in decent epub readers, you can get the full image alone to zoom in on detail. Until I figure part of this out, I think I need to go back to the images and crop them for only the detail area and see how that changes the exports.