Hemingway Editor to MD

Ming Vase license - if it breaks you get to keep the pieces. No awards will be won for this work.

Yes I know, the Hemingway Editor will output to markdown, but you have to do it every time. And if you are like me, you might want to use the output in a different system (e.g. Leanpub). This convertor will parse a Hemingway Editor file and attempt to output Markdown (compatible with Leanpub).

If you use the git editing method for Leanpub, you can have your Hemingway files in a directory called hemingway and use the example Makefile supplied here.

hem2md

To use, install the perl JSON module. The following converts an Hemingway file into markdown. Unfortunately it does not work very well with non-Latin character sets (which is annoying if you are writing books on... non-Latin character sets, like me). I may look at reimplementing this in Go which makes such things a lot easier.

hem2md 20240130-February.hemingway >> myoutput.md

At the top of the file, there will be an HTML comment to warn that the file is automatically generated. This can be useful if you are working on a document set and are using a Makefile to process lots of Hemingway files (like me). If you supply -n it will remove the comment as sometimes it can confuse other processors.

hem2jek

To use the Jekyll script, you need jekyll and ansi2txt from colorized-logs. Run the script in your jekyll site directory. For example, the following will parse the Hemingway file, take the title formatted with # and use that to create a jekyll post in _posts. If you supply -d you'll get a draft instead of a post.

hem2jek ~/Documents/Writing/Diet\ Blog/20240130-FebruaryRules.hemingway

Caveats:

• This filter will use * for italics, not _. (Hemingway extracts use _).
• We've only filtered scenarios we have seen coming from Hemingway files. There may be scenarios not covered