Marked’s help is available in German now. If your Mac or your browser is set to German, you get the German pages without digging through a menu. Everyone else still gets English, and you can switch either way with the little flags at the top of the help window.
The full help book is translated: the in-app Help window and the pages at markedapp.com/help. Section titles, the sidebar, and the topic pages are in German. A handful of license pages stay in English, because those texts are the upstream licenses and I did not rewrite them.
A huge thanks to Thomas Heinrichsdobler for the German translation.
On the web, a German browser opens the German help. The English pages live at addresses like https://markedapp.com/help/Overview. The German pages live under /help/de/, so the same topic is https://markedapp.com/help/de/Overview. The flag buttons at the top of the page switch between them and remember the choice in the browser. After that, the saved choice wins over the browser language.
In the app, Help follows the language macOS is using. A Mac set to German opens the German help book. The same flags sit at the top of the Help window. Pick one and Marked remembers it, so you can read the English help on a German Mac, or the other way around. If a page has no German file, that page stays in English instead of showing a blank window.
German is the first language I have ready to ship. The other help locales already exist as machine-translated drafts for the most part. They need people who can read them, fix the wording in their own language, and line the terms up with the app. I am offering an hourly rate plus free licenses for that work.
The drafts are in the help source repository: github.com/ttscoff/marked-docs. English is the root of that repo. Each language has its own folder.
I am looking for translators for:
es)fr)hu)it)ja)nl)pt-BR)zh-Hans)zh-Hant)If you want a language, write to me and tell me which folder you would take. I’d prefer to keep the work on GitHub, but if you’re not familiar with Git and/or GitHub, I’m willing to work by shuffling files back and forth. I just lose the audit log in that process.
I don’t have a timeline for these additional languages, and I’ll publish them when they’re marked as confident. The Help is constantly changing and being added to, so I would prefer translators willing to keep up with pull requests in the future.
Previously, I made the mistake of trying to wrangle all of the localizations (and translators) at once and ended up with a mess of half-finished translations. So I’ll be tackling these one at a time, with the order determined by who gets back to me first. Germany is my second largest chunk of App Store sales, so I’m happy that ended up being the first focus.
I’ve become somewhat enamored with an app called Finis. It’s like a lightweight version of Scrivener, focused entirely on Markdown, with a distraction free editor reminiscent of Byword. Fantastic looking, great keyboard shortcuts, index card and outline views, draft/research folders, change/version tracking, and more.
The real beauty of Finis, to me, is that it stores the book as Markdown files, one per chapter or section, with a JSON file and clear schema for assembling the book. Which means Marked can take a .finis bundle and preview the entire book, in the order you defined in the app. Finis already has some good export options, but this adds a more, plus more styles, and you can see the finished book update as you edit.
In case you missed it, I also improved support for Traverse and Tree Outliner. Traverse has especially tight integration, with Streaming Preview support that can differentiate between prose, outline, and Fountain screenwriting. You can open Tree Outliner documents, or embed them in other files as an outline or mind map.
There is a new Copy Markdown command. It is in the Edit menu, the gear menu, and the preview’s contextual menu, and the shortcut is ⌥+⇧+⌘+C.
It copies the Markdown Marked used to build the preview. It does not try to turn the rendered HTML back into Markdown. That matters for a page you opened with Markdownify and have not saved yet: the Markdown is only in the preview, and Copy Markdown can still grab it.
In addition, I made all of the special copy commands work on selections, so rather than copying an entire document, you have the option to copy the source/RTF/markdown for a fragment by making a selection first.
Help now includes a SKILL.md you can hand to an agent. It tells the agent how to open files and folders in Marked, jump to a Settings section, and change preferences through the x-marked-3:// URL handler. The page, including the skill download, is AI Integration.
If you’re already a Marked user, you can update through the channel you’re subscribed through. If all of this has you curious, learn more and download a free trial at markedapp.com.
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on GitHub, Mastodon, and elsewhere.
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