Free and open-source markdown editor for macOS, Windows and Linux.
You also have to install pandoc to export to most formats.
Focus on the content of your text. No fiddling around in menus or getting distracted by buttons. No selecting fonts and layouting before your text is actually written. Instead, you can write text in Markdown – a convention on how to write plain text files. Basically, it’s like you would write an Email.
PanWriter highlights a few things, like headings, for you. Other than that, it just gets out of the way, so you can focus on your text.
Pandoc is a well-known and treasured
tool among hackers.1 It can convert between all sorts of
document formats – from and to Markdown, HTML webpages, MS Office Word
.docx, EPUB eBooks, LaTeX for academic publishing, and many
more. You can even generate PDF and PowerPoint slide-shows, as well as
export to InDesign ICML. But until now, users had to master the
command-line, before they could tap into the power of pandoc. No
longer!
But if you eventually need to automate your workflow, it’s easy to start using pandoc on the command-line, write pandoc scripts that transform your documents in highly customizable ways, or integrate with web services or other applications – all while continuing to write in PanWriter.
Simply drag a .docx-file onto the PanWriter app: it will
be converted to Markdown and opened so you can edit the text in the
distraction-free writing environment of PanWriter. When you’re done, use
File -> Export to convert the text back to .docx, or any
other of pandoc’s output formats.
Once you’ve written a first draft of your text, you might want to see how it would look like in print. Instead of exporting, you can simply open the preview pane. A unique feature among markdown editors is that PanWriter actually lays out your text on pages in the preview – suddenly your text becomes tangible, and you can see where pagebreaks end up.
It’s not a good idea to start layouting before you’ve finished the hard work of the first few drafts. But once you’re there, you can apply a pre-defined layout template – or tune the layout yourself by adding a few lines of CSS, the layouting language of the web. Changes are reflected live in the preview.
PanWriter is free and open source software. Visit PanWriter on GitHub and please open an issue if you have a question or would like to give feedback.