Markdown to Word is a ginchy little service that will take Markdown-formatted text, and put it into Microsoft Word, making use of Word’s style sheets to do so.

This is in all ways identical in function to my previous TextMate script which does the same thing, except that this also auto-formats once in Word.

You may notice some funniness in the conversion. Lists, in particular, sometimes don’t convert perfectly. This is part of Apple’s textutil program, which is very handy, but sometimes a little… er… special in how it handles things. I take neither blame nor credit for its output.

IMPORTANT! This service relies on the setfile utility, included with Apple’s free “XCode” developer tools. You’ll need to have those installed (at least the developer applications).

And, of course, this program wouldn’t exist were it not for John Gruber’s “Markdown.” Mr. Gruber retains all copyright, etc., to said code. Disclaimers can be read below and are included with the Zip archive.

http://www.daringfireball.net/markdown

I am eternally grateful to Mr. Gruber for giving me Markdown. Without it, I’d probably be writing in LaTEX or something. Ugh.

Thanks to Andy I for this terrific resource. CSS and web development in general really gets me down. I feel like I’m just fixing other people’s bugs all day long. Having a site like this one that inspires creativity is a real pleasure. At least until I try to make Drupal do it.

Using CSS to do Anything

This script uses BBEdit to convert HTML to lightly formatted text. Unlike BBEdit’s “Translate” utility, this maintains links, image ALT text, and even formats headers and bold text as all-caps. The formatting is ideal for making plain text versions of HTML email messages — which is the reason I created it in the first place.

For best results, drop this in the BBEdit Scripts folder. (you can open it from BBEdit’s script menu!)