Hi! I was previously using Bike 2.0 Preview 265 in early March. Today I launched Bike 2.0, updated it to Preview 278, and opened the same bikemd document I was working on previously, and all formatting is lost. Basically I’m seeing the file as a text file (although it does have its outline structure).
I presume there has been some change in the behind-the-scenes structure of documents. Any suggestions on how I can open / import the document in such a way that the formatting is restored? Thanks!
I’ve “solved” the problem by throwing away Preview 278 and restoring Preview 265 (from backup), but it would be great to be able to move the document forward in some coherent manner.
To fix change the file extension from .bikemd to .md.
Bike supports a subset of Markdown. I started by defining a new bikemd file format to denote this subset. That was clear for Bike, but then mean’t Bike Markdown documents were not easily recognized as Markdown by other tools. So I removed support for .bikemd and now just recognize .md file extension. If the .md document doesn’t conform to the Bike Markdown subset I show a warning.
Hope that makes some sense.
I decided to stop support for specialized .bikemd and instead just support standard Markdown .md. If you rename your file to use the .md file extension it should show the formatting again.
That’s great, thanks! I can now open the document with formatting using Preview 278.
(I don’t agree with the use of the .md suffix here, because Bike Markdown is not Markdown (as is easily proved by trying to open a Bike document with a normal Markdown editor such as Typora). But we’ve already had that argument and I don’t really want to have it again. )
Okay, so now what about my theme where I had darkened the vertical lines and the flippy triangles and the diagonal arrows? Is there some straightforward way to restore that? If not, I suppose I can recreate it from scratch…
Oooh, never mind; the preference to use my theme just got lost, that’s all. I went into the Settings window and set it again, and the document changed to use it. Yay!
Is the original document sharable? There may be a good reason, but I would have thought row links written by 265 would be readable by current version. In my quick test they seem to be, but maybe testing different situation.
The norm used by Typora is its own variant of the Github variant
My personal preference at the moment, is to:
Edit with .bike files – full semantic richness – special attributes and ids can be used but hidden, and
Read and write other formats via Pandoc (using a custom Pandoc writer and a Pandoc reader – both drafted, for .bike, in lua)
I notice that Typora also uses Pandoc to extend its range of exports beyond HTML and PDF, but there may be ergonomic and aesthetic economies, for some users, in simply skipping the stage of hunting for the least ill-fitting leaf on the rich and flourishing bush of differing Markdowns.
(At the root of which is the wonderfully fertile and flexible, but understandably gappy, and under-defined, Gruber spec)
The central issue, it seems to me, is that there is more than one way to map an outline to a traditionally serial text with heading levels, body paragraphs, code and quote blocks, bulleted and ordinal lists, etc.
(FWIW, I personally serialise contiguous sequences of body rows to flattened paragraphs, delimited where I leave a blank row)
Direct reading from .bike to Pandoc types, can allow for as many options, and as much flexibility, as you like.
The whole point of the Gruber spec was to ease our access to HTML encoding.[1]
Bike lets you outline in a legible and fluid context, which is already structurally valid HTML.
The thematic sentence of Gruber’s introduction was Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. ↩︎
The goal (and assumption at this point, though it hasn’t been extensively used yet, so hard to be sure) is that .bike and Bike’s .md should both encode the same information. There shouldn’t be any reason to use on other the other based on semantic richness. Instead that choice should be:
.bike - Easier for external tools to parse, opens in web browser
.md - Easier to edit in a text editor, round trips markdown tools
What I personally appreciate about the .bike format, whether displayed in a browser or in Bike.app, is that the full semantic richness – inline formatting, row types and other attributes, is cleanly divided into two layers or planes – an uncluttered visible layer, and a software-accessible hidden layer.
The .md format clearly has good uses, but for my taste its single plane does make ids, classes and other attributes collide a little with the eye
The links did exist as links but clicking one put up an error dialog. But it’s no big deal.
Please don’t worry about any of this; I’m well aware that everything is in constant development and flux! You have bigger things to do than worrying about backwards compatibility.
