On Monday, Marked's developer released a major update, version 1.4. I've been testing Marked 1.4 for a while, and it improves the program considerably--although it also limits the program to Lion (OS X 10.7).

The most obvious new additions are two new preview styles, Amblin and Upstanding Citizen, each of which is quite good--I'm particularly fond of Amblin. But there are a slew of other new features that improve the app's utility. My favorite is a tiny one: Whenever you save a change to your document, Marked can automatically scroll its preview to, and mark, the location of that change, making it easy to immediately see how a particular change affects the output. The feature isn't perfect--as the , it's a difficult thing to get right--but it works well enough that I've come to depend on it.

Another favorite is that when using the HTML-source feature--which displays the HTML code that corresponds to a Markdown document's text and formatting--Marked now uses syntax highlighting on HTML/XML entities. Similarly, if your document has code blocks, Marked will now use syntax highlighting when previewing those blocks. The developer has also added support for a special syntax for forcing page breaks when printing.

users will appreciate that Marked can now display full-project previews and has added support for inline footnotes. Marked can even create hierarchical headers based on your project's pages, and it will automatically convert text marked in Scrivener with "Preserve Formatting" to code blocks in the Marked preview. For those who don't use Scrivener, Marked now supports several mechanisms (including and ) for including multiple files in a single preview.

Advanced users get some new features, too. If you use different preview styles for different documents, you can now add a simple metadata style header to your documents; Marked will use that header to determine which style to use when previewing each document. You can also now run Marked from the shell (command line), you can use fenced code blocks, and if you use custom file processors, Marked can now automatically choose a processor based on each document's filename and extension.