Emacs Tip #8 : markdown

I saw a post for auto-generating HTML and thought, neat trick. My preferred email client is Gnus, which already mimics that (changing *text* into text and so forth).

But how cool would it be to have both my regular text show up, as well as an HTML version (when useful) - I already write using the syntax of markdown.

Mr. O'Connor happened to choose to do integration using Python (preferred programming language). Of course I don't grok Python, so getting it to work isn't quite as easy as running the Perl version.

So I coded up similar functionality, only I also tweaked things such that only the text before the signature line is converted into HTML.

(defun mimedown ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (message-goto-body)
    (let* ((sig-point (save-excursion (message-goto-signature) (forward-line -1) (point)))
           (orig-txt (buffer-substring-no-properties (point) sig-point)))
      (shell-command-on-region (point) sig-point "Markdown.pl" nil t)
      (insert "<#multipart type=alternative>\n")
      (insert orig-txt)
      (insert "<#part type=text/html>\n< html>\n< head>\n< title> HTML version of email</title>\n</head>\n< body>")
      (exchange-point-and-mark)
      (insert "\n</body>\n</html>\n<#/multipart>\n"))))