After I finished yesterday's blog post on my dropbox/plaintext workflow, I realized I'd failed to discuss a really important part of this kind of change: switching your existing stuff over to markdown/plaintext.
I also realized I didn't have time to write another long post today, so instead you get a (second) screencast, focused on getting docx and html pages into markdown.
Awesome!
I'll have to spend a few afternoons making this happen.
I tend to do a little a time – look a folder, convert the stuff I can, change the .doc stuff to docx, et cetera.
I haven't gotten super brave and deleted the old versions, but to be honest I don't really need to – more likely I'll just toss them in archive folders.
I left a comment on your blog as well, do you use Ulysses to ship to other formats, or do you use a tool like Pandoc?
I haven't used Pandoc in awhile. Mostly I'll use Ulysses and iA Writer. They both output to Word, and I've used both. If I remember correctly, Ulysses does something wonky with margins, but I have to change the fonts and paragraph spacing and stuff anyway, so that's a minor thing to fix.
Ulysses is my go-to for exporting to epub – it's great because I don't have to take any intermediate step, like saving to word first and then making an epub from that with an third tool.
Ironically, I don't usually have to export to html (which is the easiest thing to export to – the thing EVERYONE can do), because the forums I run and all my wordpress blogs all have plug-ins that let them understand markdown and publish it accordingly, which is really nice.