Monday, November 10, 2014

MultiMarkdown on Ubuntu


Markdown has been around for years, 10 years to be exact. And I haven't really given it much thought until I started using my iPad as a lighter alternative to carrying around a laptop. I know I wouldn't be able to compile and stuff, and I do miss my computer habits from time to time.
So now I've started using Markdown, or MultiMarkdown to be precise since it does feature enhancements vanilla Markdown lacks. One of them is support for Tables. I know, a lot of my colleagues shy away from tables, but I do work in a technical field surrounded by smart engineers who works a lot with tabular data.

On my iPad I have Editorial and have been using it for a few days now that it's deeply ingrained into my daily workflow. But on my desktop... I use what's available. Depending on my mood, I use Mome, Retext, Uberwriter, or plain ole' Vim. But I do use Uberwriter the most especially when I'm drafting a long communiqué.
And then I started working on technical reports.... most of which requires tabular data. Damn!
So I started hunting down a MultiMarkdown application, and stumbled upon MdCharm. Yes, it does support tables. But there's a catch... there's no PPA, and it's no longer being updated/maintained. So if you have time, maybe you could fork the project and help out the community.

Just look at that! Looks great doesn't it?

And if, after installing, you can't seem to launch MdCharm, try launching it from the command line and check for errors. I got the following:
mdcharm: error while loading shared libraries: libhunspell.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
It's weird since I already have libhunspell installed, but upon locate I found this: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0

So it's just a matter of symlinking it:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell.so