Markdown to Word is a ginchy little service that will take Markdown-formatted text, and put it into Microsoft Word, making use of Word’s style sheets to do so.

This is in all ways identical in function to my previous TextMate script which does the same thing, except that this also auto-formats once in Word.

You may notice some funniness in the conversion. Lists, in particular, sometimes don’t convert perfectly. This is part of Apple’s textutil program, which is very handy, but sometimes a little… er… special in how it handles things. I take neither blame nor credit for its output.

IMPORTANT! This service relies on the setfile utility, included with Apple’s free “XCode” developer tools. You’ll need to have those installed (at least the developer applications).

And, of course, this program wouldn’t exist were it not for John Gruber’s “Markdown.” Mr. Gruber retains all copyright, etc., to said code. Disclaimers can be read below and are included with the Zip archive.

http://www.daringfireball.net/markdown

I am eternally grateful to Mr. Gruber for giving me Markdown. Without it, I’d probably be writing in LaTEX or something. Ugh.

This just in: A MacIIci is faster than a 3ghz P4 Windows box!

Low End Mac compared the performance of a brand new 3 ghz Windows box to an old Mac running system 6. While the comparison was limited strictly to word processing and boot-up times, an upgraded MacIIci blows the doors off the Windows box.

Of course, without restricting yourself to System 6, you can generate considerable performance improvements by just using snappier and faster application. I’m a huge fan of all of Mariner’s products, and find MarinerWrite can open and edit large documents with speeds that put Word to shame.