Marked 2.5—a major update to my Markdown preview and writing tools collection—is now available for direct purchase and from the Mac App Store! It’s a free upgrade for all Marked 2 customers, and available at a discounted $11.99 for new customers right now.

I teased a few of the new features in August, but there was a lot of testing and polishing to do before release. Here are some of the new features that the update offers.

Spelling and Grammar Checking

As an in-app purchase for both direct and MAS customers, Marked can now check spelling and grammar, in addition to all of the previous syntax checking, readability, and writing tools. I got frustrated having all of my analysis in Marked while proofreading but still having to pop back to my editor for spellchecking. This update solves it!

Custom Global Shortcuts

You can now assign a shortcut to allow you to jump to Marked from anywhere, but my favorite shortcut is the “Raise first window” hotkey. This will pop the top window (assumably your most recent) to the foreground without losing focus in your current application.

New Application Support

Marked 2 now has official support for MindNode and Xcode Playground files. It also amps up support for Scrivener by recognizing more of its internal syntaxes (comments, page breaks, line breaks, internal links and embedded images).

Fountain preview is updated for accuracy, and now supports “forced” elements. You can also toggle comment visibility for both Scrivener and Fountain formats.

New Help System

The new help system provides a smarter fuzzy search for topics, a URL scheme for bookmarking and deep linking, and easy bookmarking of topics. It also hooks into the OS X help system in a way that allows you to pop up the Help menu item (⇧⌘/) and search both menu items and help topics (by text and keywords) at once.

More

Override export font sizes, set a custom font for headers and footers (font, size, and color options), add an automatic page break after a Table of Contents, and it even has improved tools for preventing widowed words and orphaned paragraphs in export.

Take a look at the full release notes if that’s not enough to intrigue. If you’re a writer of any kind and haven’t checked out Marked 2, I (obviously) recommend taking a look!