I just pushed out build 822 of Marked 2. It’s a free update to all current users, so “Check for Updates” in the Marked menu to grab it. If you want to try it out before you buy, just download the free trial at marked2app.com. If you’re a Marked 1 user looking to upgrade, just drop me a line for a coupon.

There are numerous fixes and improvements in this release, including MathJax configuration updates, Syntax Highlighting improvements and a fix for MultiMarkdown metadata like “Base Header Level” and “Quotes Language” not being recognized. Marked 2’s ability to detect changes to embedded images and update the preview automatically is also repaired.

There are a couple of new features as well. First, opening external files is vastly improved. If you click a link to a local file that isn’t recognized as a filetype Marked can handle, it will now ask to open it in the default application for that type instead of giving you a big “fail” message. You can choose to make your choice the default, too, so it can just open files without asking.

Clicking links to other Markdown files is also improved. It will now ask if you want to open the document in the current window or a new one, and will properly load the new file in the preview.

The second new feature affects Jekyll and other users of YAML frontmatter. Marked 2 now offers three ways of handling YAML in the preview:

  • Ignore, which will leave the YAML in your document
  • Remove, which will strip the YAML before it continues to the main processor
  • Convert to MMD, which will remove the borders from the YAML block and allow MultiMarkdown to read the key/value pairs as MMD metadata

Conversion to MMD isn’t perfect yet, and doesn’t do well with arrays and other structures besides strings and comma-delimited lists. This will be improved soon, but works great right now for keys like “title,” which Marked 2 can use for naming saved files and other tasks.

See the complete release notes for more details. If you haven’t already, grab a copy of Marked 2 now!