Understand: I never do this, and I pretty much know beans about the shell programs involved. I toyed with the idea of doing this in Ruby, but that seemed like a pain, so I wrote a short shell script. Going a paragraph at a time is not a problem - it’s actually preferable, since I’m editing as I go, so moving a whole file at a time is not really what I want. What I’d like is a workflow where I can copy a paragraph of text to the clipboard, do magic, and then paste cleaned-up text in the new book file. I’ve decided that I don’t need to do this when I write in Markdown, so when I move the text over, I need to get rid of all the hard returns and spacing. In my XML source, I really do still insist on an 80-character line, with hard returns and indentation. The less obvious one is that when writing XML text, I treat it like code, meaning I’m ridiculously insane about text layout.The obvious one is that there are XML tags in the body of the text for things like code literals and text italics that I want to replace with either the Markdown backtick or the Markdown underscore.The old format is a custom XML-based language the details of which don’t matter beyond the fact that it’s XML-based. As part of my current workflow, I need to convert my text from it’s old format to my new format, which is Markdown. At it’s best, working in Mac OS X combines the power of the Unix shell with the convenience of an actual interface.Īs I may have mentioned here a few times, I’m writing a book.

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