I am new to writing and chose Ghostwriter for its simplicity. Love the simple design + preview feature, but hate that I apparently cannot customize the preview design. Or is that possible somehow?
Wanting novel like indentation after paragraphs in my preview, because what’s the point of a preview if every paragraph looks different from the final book result?
Also, is there an easy way to write “»” and “«”? Maybe even instead of normal quotes.
Last Ghostwriter release was back in 2022, think it could be time to add some features, since it’s still used by many authors.
Ok, some interesting ideas here - some slightly confused.
First, I think it’s a flawed idea to ‘Choose Ghostwriter’. It is a tool, Marktext is also a tool, Marknotes is also a tool.
Ghostwriter is a simple Markdown editor, not a layout tool.
Also, your post is vague - as I load novels into my book readers, and they use flowing text without fixed layouts…
You can customise the live HTML preview (but that’s a preview, not the final book result) by using custom CSS style sheets… if you know how to use them.
p {
text-indent: 1.5em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
margin-top: 0em;
}
So you’d need a CSS file defining the text-indent.
Typing Guillemets in Linux
You can locate characters using KCharselect.
For example:
Character: « U+00AB
Name: LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
Annotations and Cross References
Alias names:
left guillemet
chevrons (in typography)
Notes:
usually opening, sometimes closing
See also:
≪ U+226A MUCH LESS-THAN
《 U+300A LEFT DOUBLE ANGLE BRACKET
General Character Properties
Block: Latin-1 Supplement
Unicode category: Punctuation, Initial Quote
Various Useful Representations
UTF-8: 0xC2 0xAB
UTF-16: 0x00AB
C octal escaped UTF-8: \302\253
XML decimal entity: «
You can type them with the compose key:
Compose < < ⇒ « guillemotleft
Compose > > ⇒ » guillemotright
It seems to me that this is already defined in my compose sequences. Compose>> Compose<<
For me, the Right Alt (marked Level3 Shift) with Shift gets those… []
⇧Shift → { }
Right Alt“ ”
⇧ShiftRight Alt« »
It would be trivial to edit and modify the keyboard layout if I wished to swap these (I don’t use them often, so Shift-Alt is fine)…
So that’s a typing issue, not a ghostwriter issue.
There are quite a few other Markdown editors available…
Marknote is one which lets you contain all your MD files in a folder structure (similar to Obsidian)… but has limited customisation… but is excellent for composing, editing, and organising a bunch of Markdown documents.
Obsidian isn’t fully FOSS, but allows for more customisation. and a strong contender for composing Markdown documents.
The trouble is, the layout you see in these previews is not the final document, but simply an interpretation…
Markdown is a minimal formatting syntax… for some slightly more advanced formatting look here:
You could also look at something like novelwriter:
You’re right that the guillemets are a keyboard issue, not a Ghostwriter one. That said, if new features were ever added to Ghostwriter, the matched-characters feature could potentially include them too — probably just a line of code.
Regarding the CSS styling, that’s exactly what I meant by “customizing the preview design.” You mentioned it’s possible to apply custom CSS to the Ghostwriter preview — but how? That’s really my main question, because as far as I can tell, it isn’t currently possible. I believe it used to work in very early versions, but not anymore. On Windows, the styles directory only contains a .dll file, so the styles appear to be precompiled.
I’d be really interested if you know a way to add a stylesheet — maybe I’ve missed something. If not, I think it would be a great feature request: a setting that lets you drop in a CSS file to be used for the preview.
Thanks also for listing the other editors — I’ll definitely check them out. I just love how simple Ghostwriter’s interface is. Honestly, the only thing that bothers me about it is not being able to drop in a custom CSS stylesheet for the preview.
PS: I’m actually a web developer and would like to contribute to the project. I had my coding AI scan the repo (it’s not a tech stack I’m fluent in). According to it, forking the repo is easy, but changing the styles requires a new build step with quite a bit of setup on my machine.
I could try implementing the two feature requests above with AI assistance — it probably isn’t much coding work, just a lot of setup to get the build environment running locally. But I don’t want to put in that effort only for myself. If a project maintainer could confirm they’d actually want these features merged, I’d happily give it a shot and submit a pull request. That said, if there’s a developer already familiar with the stack and with their build environment set up, it would probably be better coming from them.
