I am trying - unsuccessfully so far - to export Scrivener documents as markdown.

Exporting Markdown from Scrivener

I love markdown and I’m determined to love Scrivener, so I eagerly read Hunder Emkay’s long article about using markdown in Scrivener, where I saw the repeated assertion that Scrivener can export Markdown, but no explanation of how to do it.

How does Scrivener store imported Markdown files?

Scrivener can import Markdown files, but I’ve wondered if the imported documents were stored as markdown.

Will King, in a reply to a question I posted on Google+, enlightened me with a simple parenthetical note:

(RTF is Scrivener’s native document format.)

Should I write in markdown in Scrivener?

Given that Scrivener stores its files in RTF format, does it make sense to try to write in markdown in Scrivener? Thaddeus Hunt does this, even going so far as to enter all his markdown, including headers, into Scrivener, as show here:

Markdown in Scrivener

It may not make a lot of sense to do this once we realize, as Hunder Emkay points out, that “If writing text files in Markdown, you can’t see what they will look like inside Scrivener.”

So I am going to try to just write in Scrivener and export it as needed.

Scrivener can export markdown as HTML

Here are a couple or examples:

But I want to export Scrivener documents as markdown

I want to export Scrivener documents as markdown, not as HTML, in order to incorporate it into my jekyll-based blog, my Day One diary, etc.

A sample Scrivener document

I have made

fig 1

The way (I am told) to export a Scrivener document as markdown is to use the Compile command with certain configurations. Copying the kind advice of Chris Lott and Will King, I specify this:

fig 2

and this:

fig 3

and here’s what I get:

fig 4

As you can see, this is not markdown:

  1. The exported file has no file extension, much less ‘.md’ as I want.
  2. There are no markdown headers at all.

I need help.