FlipFlop 3.0Markdown Toolbar
The markdown toolbar was created by utilising and adapting existing methods and scripts. I have pulled them altogether along with, in some cases, hefty modifications to create a Markdown Toolbar.
There are a lot of WYSIWYG utilities out there, but very few create good mark-up. Even fewer enable you to edit the text without having to sift through mark-up that may be unintelligible. This is where Markdown is useful, but, until now, without a toolbar users have had to remember the syntax.
These scripts are designed to fill that gap but a few extras have also been added to enhance the experience.
Firstly Increase/Decrease links have been added to allow authors to change the size of the main textarea at will.
Secondly, there is now an option to set access keys. Not everyone uses accesskeys, so, by default, none are set. But if you do require keyboard shortcuts, you can define as many, or as few, of your own as you want.
Finally the added extra that has not been widely available, at least for Markdown – an instant preview.
I use PHP Markdown which is available from http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/ and was originally developed by Michel Fortinas a PHP port of the original Perl version by John Gruber. The orginal can be found at
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/.
I would like to thank the following people for allowing me to use their scripts:
To enable the preview I utilised prototype.js from http://prototype.conio.net/ and the example on http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/pivot/entry.php?id=325
As the preview was dependant on javascript, I did originally try to utilise the editable accesskeys script from http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000723.html. However following some unsolvable errors (probably just integrating issues), I had to abandon that approach and utilised my own PHP accesskey class instead.
PHP is not required to get the main scripts to work, but you, without it, you will not be able to use the accesskeys option.
For download and instructions please see the Markdown Toolbar installation post.
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