Free and open-source markdown editor for macOS, Windows and Linux.
You also have toinstallpandoc to export to most formats.
Focus on the content of your text. No fiddling around in menus orgetting distracted by buttons. No selecting fonts and layouting beforeyour text is actually written. Instead, you can write text inMarkdown – a convention on howto write plain text files. Basically, it’s like you would write anEmail.
PanWriter highlights a few things, like headings, for you. Other thanthat, it just gets out of the way, so you can focus on your text.
Pandoc is a well-known and treasuredtool among hackers.1 It can convert between all sorts ofdocument formats – from and to Markdown, HTML webpages, MS Office Word.docx, EPUB eBooks, LaTeX for academic publishing, and manymore. You can even generate PDF and PowerPoint slide-shows, as well asexport to InDesign ICML. But until now, users had to master thecommand-line, before they could tap into the power of pandoc. Nolonger!
But if you eventually need to automate your workflow, it’s easy tostart using pandoc on the command-line, writepandoc scripts thattransform your documents in highly customizable ways, or integrate withweb services or other applications – all while continuing to write inPanWriter.
Simply drag a.docx-file onto the PanWriter app: it willbe converted to Markdown and opened so you can edit the text in thedistraction-free writing environment of PanWriter. When you’re done, useFile -> Export to convert the text back to .docx, or anyother of pandoc’s output formats.
Once you’ve written a first draft of your text, you might want to seehow it would look like in print. Instead of exporting, you can simplyopen the preview pane. A unique feature among markdown editors is thatPanWriter actually lays out your text on pages in the preview – suddenlyyour text becomes tangible, and you can see where pagebreaks end up.
It’s not a good idea to start layouting before you’ve finished thehard work of the first few drafts. But once you’re there, you can applya pre-defined layout template – or tune the layout yourself by adding afew lines ofCSS, thelayouting language of the web. Changes are reflected live in thepreview.
PanWriter is free and open source software. VisitPanWriter onGitHub and please open an issue if you have a question or would liketo give feedback.