By now, you probably know that we love Markdown -- the simple and easy to use HTML editor. While there are many other capable tools out there, we recently ran across an app called Valletta that not only creates Markdown (.md) documents, but also lets you export your work to HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word documents.
>> Valletta ($6.99 on the Mac App Store)
To get started, open Valletta and begin typing out your Markdown document with the Markdown Source Editor or the Combined Editor. The source editor is just a straight, no-frills text editor that will allow you to see all of the Markdown syntax. The combined editor lets you see the syntax while you’re typing, but when you leave the block of text, it automatically converts the Markdown syntax to a preview.
Valletta includes a handy Markdown guide that you can access by clicking on the small question mark at the bottom, right-hand side of the window.
Once you have finished editing your document, you can click File > Save to save your document as a Markdown document (.md filetype), or use one of the five other export options located in the File menu for Valletta.
Clicking this option will copy the HTML code for the markdown document directly to your clipboard, bypassing an intermediary file. This means that you can paste the HTML code directly into your HTML editor, or blog post.
The export option will export the entire markdown document into an HTML page, ready for you to upload to your server, or extract parts of the document for pasting into your HTML editor.
This is where Valletta makes itself worth the money. You can export your markdown document directly to Microsoft Word, without any need to fiddle around with Word’s crazy formatting options. Plus, it gets exported as Word 97 format (.doc) instead of the new XML (.docx) format. This means that you can open the document in older versions of Word, or in applications that don’t support the new Word XML standard.
You can also export your markdown documents into the PDF standard for easy sharing through email or the web. The PDF documents work just like the Word documents in that they are formatted the same as the original Markdown-formatted document. You’d never be able to tell that these documents weren’t created in a fancy document editor.
Cory Bohon is a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer. Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.
