ManualPublishing07

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.

No boxes where the characters should be

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.

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:

RouteWatch for
PDFEssentially one to one, formulas, tables, diagrams and canvases included. It is a printed page, so links stay clickable but nothing else is interactive.
HTMLOne to one as well. Exported without embedded fonts, a machine lacking them substitutes something else — that choice is the dialog's one question.
The .md itselfEverything 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.