I want to utilize Drafts for longer writing such newspaper articles and academic essays. iA Writer offers a feature that color-codes parts of speech like adverbs and adjectives, aiding in refining my writing. Do you think that implementing this feature is possible in Drafts? I could compose in Drafts and send to iA Writer through a Drafts action.
Jim Adams
USA KY
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Marked 2 by Brett Terpstra is a Markdown previewer and processor that will probably do what you want. There are options for proofing that will let you visualize repetition, parts of speech, and other metrics. Drafts integrates well with it since you can set Marked to use “Streaming Preview” in the “Preview” menu and it will re-render a preview whenever you make changes to any Drafts draft. Drafts’ included default Markdown preview is fine for most uses, but Marked has far more features and options.
I’ve been using Marked for previewing Markdown files since version 1, long before Drafts was available on macOS. I highly recommend it. It has a lot of options for many different types of output — including options to use a preferred pre-processor or Markdown rendering engine, if desired — and you can (with some knowledge of CSS) make your own theme to produce output that is exactly what you want, if one of the included themes or community-produced themes doesn’t do what you want. I’ve found that whenever something doesn’t render as expected in another preview, Marked will almost certainly handle it.
You can also export to several different file formats, or produce output for printing with control over pretty much everything from the fonts, spacing, margins, headers and footers, and other layout, and can define automatically-generated content like page numbers and section headings that replace placeholder text.
It’s included in Setapp if you’re already subscribed to that service, but is absolutely worth the price as a standalone app. Considering the amount of use I get out of it, I should probably send Terpstra a tip that matches the purchase price every couple of years whether or not he puts out a paid upgrade version.
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Isshin,
Thank you for the recommendation. I’ll give it a try this weekend. I’m familiar with Terpstra and a couple of other apps he has created.
Again, thanks very much.
Jim