Markdown | Getting to Know Drafts with David Sparks

0:09 I'm sure some of you are watching this screencast asking yourself what is markdown markdown is an easy way to convert plain text to formatted text and that's really important on the iPhone and iPad because a lot of applications don't support rich text like bold and italic so how do you do markdown well there's whole books written on it but it's quite simple really if you take a word like baseball there it is in plain text and that's exactly how it's going to appear on your device and maybe that's the way you want to print it out but what if you wanted to make it italic to do markdown all you would do is put an asterisk or an underscore at the front and back of the word and then markdown would automatically convert that to italics that works the same for bold but you'd use two instead of one you put two asterisks in front of the word two asterisks at the back of the

0:56 word and it comes out as bold baseball there's a lot more you can do with markdown like headings or links and like I said there's a lot more to learn about it but the important part is that drafts fully supports markdown and you can write in markdown and drafts and have it export as rich text which is exactly what you're going for you can even preview your markdown as rich text right in the application let me show you how Here I am in drafts with some text that I'd like to apply some markdown syntax to so the first thing I want to do is make sure that markdown syntax highlighting is turned on I'll hit the little font button at the bottom and across this top line here you can see it could be plain text markdown or social I want it to be marked down in that way as I apply the markdown syntax

1:43 you'll get a little preview so I've done that and let's go ahead and apply some markdown I'm going to start with this field of dreams line because that's a movie title that should be italicized and in markdown you would do that with an asterisk or an underscore at the beginning and end but with drafts it's much easier because they have across the top of the keyboard this extended keyboard and there are some markdown buttons like this one right here that has the single asterisk which would give me italics so I'm just going to go ahead tap that and you can see that it put an asterisk on either side and it actually italicized the text and that's because I had the syntax highlighting turned on let's apply a heading as well to the top line where it says baseball movies and the heading symbol in markdown is the

2:30 hash tag so I'm going to just tap on this heading button right here and the extended keyboard and you can see it made it a heading and it added bold text to it and let's go ahead and add some bold as well I'll bold this section right here and again there's a button for that so this extended keyboard button with the two asterisks will put two asterisks on either side of the selected text and make it bold and just for giggles I'll go ahead and italicize the bad news bears as well and I'm gonna use the single asterisk button for italicized and there it is once you've got the markdown formatting applied in

3:17 drafts you can even preview it by swiping in from the right of the screen and going down to the markdown tab and say preview and you can see there it is with the heading bold the italicized looks great and now you know you've got rich text available from your plain text editor now I want to show you one more thing in markdown and we're gonna apply a link so I'm gonna select the bad news bears and then I'm gonna go over to Wikipedia and you can see I've got a Wikipedia article there on the bad news bears I'll go ahead and copy that link and then I will go back into drafts and I'm gonna add a link now if I scroll over with the extended keyboard you can

4:02 see there's the markdown the link button I'll go ahead and tap on that and it just created the markdown syntax and put the cursor right in the middle of those two parentheses which is exactly where you'd put the link so I'll go ahead and paste it in and now I have a link so if I do this as an email you can see it's created a new email with a link right inside the email that's actually quite difficult to do on the iPad and iPhone without something like drafts and markdown while we're looking at that extended keyboard I want to show you how to customize it now to do that you want to scroll all the way to the right and tap on this edit button here and that'll open a list of the current available extended keyboard keys

4:49 you can edit those if you like or add new ones by tapping on the plus icon button in the upper right corner and you can see there's a bunch of them built in but there's also this directory button and I've got another screencast on that later but I'm going to show it to you real quickly here so let's go ahead and visit the directory and that'll take you to the directory website it's currently showing the actions but I want to look at key so I'm gonna scroll down to keys and tap done and just look for ones that involve markdown and you'll see there's a bunch of keys I can add to that extended keyboard involving markdown here's one on the horizontal line that marked down it can add I like that one so I'm gonna go ahead and tap the install button and then we'll open it in

5:34 drafts and it added it to my keyboard you'll see it's down at the bottom there so when I click done and I'll go up here where there's the baseball movies hit a carriage return and you can see right here on the far right there's the horizontal line markdown button I'll go ahead and tap that and that adds the code for horizontal line now when I preview that it you'll see that it says baseball movies that has a horizontal line underneath it and the rest of the markdown text if you spend any time writing text on your iPhone and iPad that you want to turn into rich text markdown is a great way to do it and drafts is one of the best ways to write markdown on the iPhone and iPad