What are /r/iawriter's favorite Products & Services?

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iA Writer is absolutely not meant for Zettelkasten. It's an amazing writing tool if you want to output a document (a PDF, a blog post, etc.) It has some great unique options for it like transclusion (being able to inserts the contents of one file into another), the ability to convert CSVs into nice tables, etc. But linking between notes is not its strength at all. I usually use iA Write when I want to produce a PDF.

For your use case, I'd actually recommend Craft It has amazing interlinking, including backlinks, so it should cover your Zettelkasten needs, and it supports editable freeform sketches. It has a subscription for some of the features but enough of it is free that you can test it for yourself.

Honestly, I can't think of any other app covering your specific needs...

When should we highlight the text? Is it meant for highlight few words or a whole sentence? Or is it similar to callouts in notion?

Asking this because highlighting is similar to bolding/italicizing the text for example.

I use iaWriter because it has everything I want for markdown writing and nothing I don’t. That said, one alternative is https://obsidian.md/

Like iaWriter, it edits a set of markdown files (so your text is in a pretty future-proof format) but it has a whole slew of plugins that support things like to-do lists, kanban boards, diagrams, mind-maps, etc (all stored in plain text or markdown).

In the past we've been able to add Resilio Sync folders as Locations.

There are far too many file storage providers out there for us to check on/know which ones do or don't support full folder sharing on iOS 13+. We’re a small team, and we think we should focus on what we’re best at: Providing the best writing experience. ☺️

Markdown allows for multiple paragraphs within a single list item. In order to distinguish these from simply ending the list and starting a new paragraph that is not part of the list, such paragraphs must be indented four spaces.

From the Markdown Specification:

> List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequent paragraph in a list item must be indented by either 4 spaces or one tab

This means any extra paragraphs/content you are starting within your list needs to be indented four spaces, which means code blocks need eight spaces inside lists.

If you want to have your code block on the same level as the list, we'd recommend using fenced code block syntax instead:

- list item

code goes here

It sounds like you have multiple paragraphs in your list items. This means a new list is begun with each item. Markdown doesn't care about the number used in the source, just that it follows the pattern of <number><period><space> at the start of a line.

If you want to add multiple paragraphs within a list item, they must be indented by four spaces. This is detailed in the original Markdown specification.

iA Writer uses markdown, which allows you to italize a work simply by putting before and after the word so you never need to move your hands away from the keyboard.

Reference: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

We've added this to the Markdown Guide on our support pages. While it is clear in the original Markdown spec that HTML is valid—and indeed it is part of the underlying philosophy of Markdown that it should be—we could do a better job of illustrating this ourselves. We shouldn't expect everyone to delve so far into the history.

You should check out https://blot.im. It may be the simplest solution to creating a personal website directly from iA Writer files. If you're looking for something in harmony with a minimalist philosophy, you should be happy with the available themes.

You might be interested in blot.im: https://blot.im

I’m a web developer and have built my own stack to be able to publish using iA Writer, but it isn't exactly user friendly. The main reason is that iA Writer works best with iCloud (on desktop not so much, but on iOS all the more) and — if you’ll allow my cynicism — by design iCloud does not play nice with the web. So my solution revolves around automatically rendering markdown files stored on Dropbox into web pages and uploading them to Amazon’s S3 hosting.

I am working towards support for content blocks, but there's a lot of moving parts I still have to figure out (where to store media, for instance).

The absolute best solution would be for iA to add custom publishing endpoints: Wordpress, Medium & Ghost (which you should look into also) are already supported; I would expect adding support for 'bring your own', along with a couple of pages of developer documentation would open up a world of possibilities. Unless iA are considering their own subscription blogging service, ofcourse, which wouldn’t be a bad move I suppose

That would be great, thank you.

Some context * I'm not a dev, so the only time I tried to use Git was to try to host a blog using Github and Hugo * Instead of referring to the documentation for Github, I began with this, which seemed quite daunting * However, after reading your question, I asked myself if I had indeed put in enough effort before labelling the whole thing as confusing (obviously, I did not)

Current Update * I revisited Git documentation to understand more about it and completed a few steps of the tutorial.

How do you suggest I proceed?

Well...

iA Writer can only do a clean and full folders sync with iCloud, not with Dropbox (I guess it's due to API limitations).

My question was about why not change your workflow. IMO, for wikis a better solution is something like Notion, since it allows you, among other things, work with Markdown, tables, equations, files, images, internal links. I find it the most efficient way to work with wikis.

Although, you could give a try to NotePlan, which has synchronization with Dropbox and uses Markdown as file format (haven't tested it myself, though). It has a trial version if you'd like to test it.

PS: English is not my mother tongue, sorry for my grammar mistakes.

u/MaskOfTheSun I vote for this too!

And what about implementing it as a link that would be actually a clickable search entry. In editor, it would appear as link; clicking it would insert its content into search bar. I'd appreciate this feature extremely. This is not new idea; The Archive uses this approach. It's would be a flexible way to interlink notes.

One way or another, iA Writer definitely needs a more ways of note interlinking. As far as I know, there is currently no way to point from one note to another. Internal links, ie. links to another files in library don't work (tried to use [link](./note.md)). Tags can be thought as sort of linking mechanism, but it would be cool if they were clickable (as in Bear). I plan to make a dedicated thread for this topic, because I believe it deserves a more discussion.

To the standard-ness of markdown: the special markup could be simply ignored, that is, either appear in preview unformatted, or ommited entirely. Anyway, iA Writer already uses non-standard markup for "content blocks", which I consider quite weird, because the leading slash in the file path looks like it's an absolute path.