I started using Bike for everything I write, not clearly understanding that I may be making any use outside of Bike laborious.
My fault, I know, but I kind of thought it would be a perfect place to do my writing, and then export it to another app for finishing. For example, take a piece written in Bike and use Convertkit to send it to a list.
When I copy and paste, every single line has a bullet point appended, or a symbol, reflecting something that Bike has done. But that is isn’t my real question.
How do you write long form content in Bike and make it easily convertible to other apps, like Scrivener, IA Writer, or Byword?
Is it even worth it? all the formatting functions of Bike seem to be locked up in Bike, they don’t really show up in other apps, which I guess was the idea behind Markdown: making formatting choices easily convertible to other apps. I guess I’ve only ever used Markdown friendly apps, so I haven’t encountered this conundrum before (even Convertkit supports MD).
Does anybody compose in Markdown within Bike? Any other solutions?
Yes, I sometimes compose in Markdown with Bike, then save text as a plain text file if I want to use it somewhere else. There’s no syntax highlighting for MD in Bike, though, and if you use .txt as the file type, you’ll lose Bike’s formatting features, so not ideal. I did write quite a few chapters of my novel in Bike, though, and that went directly to Scrivener via copy-paste.
The issue isn’t really text format, but that Bike is a rich text outliner, and that doesn’t play nice with markdown editors.
For copying to markdown editors like iA Writer, plain text is the way to go. If you already did formatting in Bike, you might want to copy rich text (Edit → Copy → Rich text) before pasting.
You could use BIke’s automation features to convert row types and basic formatting to their markdown equivalents if you’re really into using .bike format for long-form.
Most strait forward (as suggested by @Jeffrey) is you can just type plain text in Bike (including markdown formatting). Benefit is you can type and organize in Bike and copy/paste into a Markdown editor. Drawback is you can’t use Bike’s built in formatting commands.
Second option is to use an external tool to convert Bike’s rich text from the pasteboard into Markdown when you are ready to export. For example you could try:
Then go to your rich text Bike outline, copy the text you want converted into Markdown. And past into the above linked site. It’s not perfect. For example it will not convert Bike row level formatting (headings, ordered lists), but it does work pretty well on the inline formatting: bold, italic, links…
A third option is to make a dedicated converter from Bike to Markdown. There are many different ways someone might want to turn an outline structure into a Markdown document, so there isn’t really a best solution out there. There have been a number of scripts shared in these forms though that perform this process.