MWeb: Markdown Editor

A few weeks ago, I happened onto MWeb and everything changed. MWeb has a great preview, a good library that integrates well with its desktop version, and allows easy editing of files in external folders, including the git repository that hosts this site.

The support for GFM tables is awesome. The LaTeX support is awesome. It does a great job with inline flow chart graphics like Mermaid. The Table of Contents feature works really well as well.

Page Breaks

I went around in circles trying to find a way to indicate a hard page break in GFM (I was outputting a book of haiku to ePub and it wasn't breaking at H1, maybe too short?). Here's the HTML I needed to insert to get a hard page break:

<div style="page-break-after: always"></div>

But I would still prefer to have a simple Markdown notation for this. Yet another reason I should improve on my CSS, I suppose...

After several more months of dealing with my css ineptitude, I found the following code to put at the beginning of the markdown document:

<style>
  hr {
    page-break-before: always;
    border-width: 0px;
  }
  h1 {
    page-break-before: always;
  }
  .center {
    text-indent: 0;
    text-align: center;
  }
</style>

It effectively allows you to use either an H1 or a horizontal rule as a page break, and makes the horizontal rule non-visible. I hate seeing an hr, but I love using it to structure content while I write.

Wrap Up

MWeb can push directly to a number of publishing platforms including Medium and Wordpress, and can push images to a third party image site. If I were on a desert island and could only take one text editor, MWeb would be it. MWeb is a top of the line GFM editor that you can grow with for years, and it's a pleasure to write in every day.