Exporting your Scrivener ebook in Markdown

Scrivener is among the most acclaimed text editors and this is justifiable. But, being a writing editor with formatting, what do you do when you want to publish on a platform with exclusive Markdown support?

The good news is that Scrivener has the functionality to export files (Files>>Export>>Files>>Export text files as .md). The result is that it turns each topic in your table of contents into a different file . The dialog screen is as follows:

Specifically in my case I don't write much more on Scrivener, as I chose to use Markdown whenever possible. But I still use the tool to convert and process texts in some cases. One of these cases occurs just when I want to transform a large file into smaller ones manually , using Scrivener's "Documents>>Split" function.

As far as I know, the only other editor that has this function with manual activation is Ulysses. I also know that, for those who work with the command line in the terminal, it is possible to use the " GCSplit ". However, for sporadic editing, I don't think it's necessary to subscribe to Ulysses or venture into Linux commands.

The following video illustrates how you can do this by importing a large file into Scrivener, manually separating the new chapters with the "split" tool, and then exporting everything in Markdown with separate files.

With this approach, it is very practical to prepare chapters for publication in other tools, such as Leanpub. After all, in the free plan, Leanpub editing needs to be done through the browser, where there is no shortcut available for this. With this, if your book is small, perhaps the best way is to use copy and paste, creating each chapter also manually .

But if you have a large book or intend to do this task on a routine basis, preparing your publication with this approach may be more productive. This applies both to the full publication of the ebook on Leanpub, for example, or to the autonomous publication of chapters on your blog. For both scenarios you will have to fragment your text, so the routine is the same.

So, in addition to being a good editor, Scrivener also serves to prepare texts for publication, as it is designed to perform a part of your writing process only. This is the kind of functionality that, unfortunately, we won't see implemented in Word, as it's not a software designed to work in an integrated way with its other applications.

I've always considered Scrivener to be the best editor when it comes to importing. It is part of its value proposition to organize any large project from the import of several sources. This is enough for it to be as acclaimed as it is. But what we are seeing now is that the developers of Scrivener have not forgotten to also offer robust ways to export .

This makes the application a very versatile tool, whether for those who write within Scrivener or for those who use its features in the transformation of written texts in other environments.