Exporting and publishing
Whatever you write ends up somewhere else. Folding Mirror's job is to make sure it is still set properly when it gets there.
Export to PDF
Press ⇧⌘P, or use the toolbar's ⋯ → Export as PDF, and choose where to save. The page is A4 and the text uses the body font you chose in settings — change the font or the size and the export follows.
When exporting, Folding Mirror embeds the glyphs it used into the file. So send it to a colleague, move it to another system, open it on a machine without those fonts, and it still looks the same — this is where other tools most often come apart, especially with CJK text.
Formulas, tables, code blocks, Mermaid diagrams and sketch canvases are all drawn into the PDF as they appear, not left blank or turned back into a line of source.
Export to HTML
Press ⇧⌘E, or ⋯ → Export as HTML. What you get is a single .html file that opens in a browser on a double-click and can be dropped onto a server as it is.
Before saving, Folding Mirror asks one question: embed the body font?
- Embed: a larger file (the button says how much larger), identical on any machine and any browser. For sending to someone, choose this.
- Don't embed: a small file that uses whatever fonts the reader's machine has. For your own archive, choose this.
Whichever you pick becomes the default next time.
Export to Word
⋯ → Export as Word, or the same item in the File menu. What you get is a real .docx rather than a web page wearing a different extension: Word, WPS, Pages and Google Docs all open it, and all of them can edit it.
Headings carry Word's own Heading 1/2/3 styles, and quotes, code blocks, terms and definitions each carry a named style of their own. That is the whole point of this route: whoever receives the file and finds the type too large changes the style once, in Word, and the document follows — instead of reformatting it paragraph by paragraph.
- Lists are real numbering: a second ordered list starts again at 1 rather than carrying on from the first.
- Tables, footnotes and task lists travel as they are — footnotes become Word's own, at the foot of the page.
- Mermaid diagrams and sketch canvases go in as vectors, sharp at any size, with a raster copy alongside for readers too old to draw them.
- Formulas become pictures, in place. Word's equation editor does not read LaTeX; a picture at least looks like what was written.
Fonts are not embedded: Word only honours an embedded font on Windows, and the body face is well over ten megabytes. The file names the font instead — a reader who has it sees it, and one who does not falls back to a system face.
Just hand over the .md
The easiest route of all: your document already is a .md file on disk. Send it to a colleague, commit it to Git, publish it to a static blog — take the file, with no “export” step in between.
If it has images, remember the img/ folder beside it (see the inserting page). For a single passage, select it and press ⇧⌘C to copy the Markdown source, marks and all.
What gets left behind
Better said here than discovered at the other end:
| Route | Watch for |
|---|---|
| Essentially one to one, formulas, tables, diagrams and canvases included. It is a printed page, so links stay clickable but nothing else is interactive. | |
| HTML | One to one as well. Exported without embedded fonts, a machine lacking them substitutes something else — that choice is the dialog's one question. |
| Word | Formulas are pictures: visible and printable, but not something Word can open or edit. Fonts are not embedded, so a reader without the body face sees a system one. An inline formula sits on the baseline, which rides a hair high when it has a subscript. |
| The .md itself | Everything survives, because nothing is converted. What travels badly is the pictures: copy the img/, drawings/ and diagrams/ folders beside it, or the links point at nothing. |