I tested Marked for a few months before writing that review, and it ended up becoming a utility that I use every day and an essential part of my workflow. Like many people who write for the Web, I use publishing tools-- content-management system, , and a couple others--that don't make it easy to see what your code will look like when published. Either they offer no live previews, or (in the case of the CMS), they require you to make changes, save those changes, and then reload a preview.

With Marked, the process is much simpler: Whenever I'm editing an article or document destined for Web publication, I just open that file in Marked. I've now got a preview of my document that's instantly updated whenever I save changes in my editor. (I do most of my writing in BBEdit, and I've even got a BBEdit script that opens the current document in Marked.) The fact that Marked previews both Markdown and HTML code means that it works with both of the Web-authoring languages I use, when writing and editing, every day.

Of course, BBEdit already has a live-preview feature, as do several other text editors, but Marked's previews are simply better. For example, the program offers a number of preview styles, and you can add your own CSS templates--I have one that mimics the style sheet used by Macworld.com, so I get a pretty good idea of how my articles will look when published on this site. And if a document has sections with headers, you can quickly jump to any section in the preview. Marked's previews also include document statistics, readability metrics, and a nifty visual-highlighting feature that helps you avoid word repetition. In other words, Marked's previews help writers write better.

When you're done writing, you can quickly copy the document's generated HTML code or rendered rich text for pasting elsewhere. This feature also saves me time, as the alternative is to use a BBEdit script that converts my Markdown code to HTML, displaying that code in a new BBEdit document; I would then copy the HTML code from that document for pasting. In addition to requiring more steps, this approach means that whenever I have to edit or update an article after that HTML conversion, the original Markdown version is out of date. With Marked, I keep working on the original Markdown version, copying the generated HTML when ready. (You can also save Marked's preview as an HTML, RTF, or PDF file, or print the rendered version using your chosen style sheet.)