Markdown to .doc or .rtf

I'm interested in using a variation of Markdown for my work, but my target format is Word files (this is what my clients use, it's non-negotiable). Most implementations of Markdown would leave me with a circuitous route at best to get a Word file.

Perhaps more importantly, I'd want to be able to format things like footnotes/endnotes, which don't have any representation in Markdown or Multimarkdown, as far as I know.

Is there anything like this out there? Basically a flavor of Markdown oriented toward print rather than the screen?

Solution 1:

You can also use pandoc:

pandoc -f markdown -t docx file.md -o file.docx

One advantage compared to textutil is that the output uses paragraph styles. You can also use styles from an existing file with --reference-docx file.docx.

Solution 2:

John Gruber, one of the two inventors of Markdown, uses footnotes fairly extensively on Daring Fireball; to see his raw (pre-Markdown) formatting, append .text to one of his urls, like this: http://daringfireball.net/2012/07/this_ipad_mini_thing.text.

As far as converting Markdown to RTF, textutil is your friend. You can pipe the output of the Markdown.pl command to textutil like so:

/usr/local/bin/Markdown.pl | /usr/bin/textutil -stdin -stdout -format html -convert rtf | pbcopy # or whatever else you want to do with it

Instead of piping to pbcopy (which puts the rich text on the clipboard), you could > it to a .rtf file, or whatever else your workflow dictates.