Marcia, Marcia, Markdown
========================

  By John Gruber  
  https://daringfireball.net/2004/03/marcia_marcia_markdown  
  Thursday, 25 March 2004


Markdown 1.0b4
--------------

[Version 1.0b4 is out] [1]. No new features, just bug fixes and
improved integration with Blosxom. Thanks to everyone who submitted
bug reports. I strongly recommend this version to anyone using earlier
betas.

  [1]: /projects/markdown/


Aaron Swartz's html2text
------------------------

A handful of people have asked if there's a way to translate Markdown
in reverse -- to turn HTML back into Markdown-formatted plain text.
The short answer is yes, by using Aaron Swartz's new version of
[html2text][]:

> html2text is a Python script that convers a page of HTML into clean,
> easy-to-read plain ASCII. Better yet, that ASCII also happens to be
> valid Markdown (a text-to-HTML format).

html2text works so well that I'm planning to use it to convert most of
my old Daring Fireball articles (the ones I wrote in raw HTML). It's
worth noting that if you start with a Markdown document, translate it
to HTML, then use html2text to go back to Markdown, it won't give you
the exact same document you started with. That sort of complete
round-trip fidelity simply is not possible, but html2text comes pretty
close.

Also, much like Markdown and SmartyPants, html2text works as a BBEdit
text filter. Simply save a copy in the Unix Filters folder in your
BBEdit Support folder.

  [html2text]: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/


Gust's HumaneText
-----------------

Markdown and html2text are now available from the Mac OS X Services
menu, thanks to [Gust's HumaneText] [ht], a free utility for Mac OS X
10.3 or later. This means you can use Markdown from Services-aware
apps, including [SubEthaEdit] [se] and TextEdit.

  [ht]: http://gu.st/proj/HumaneText.service/
  [se]: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/