http://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2019/10/09/convert-md-rtf-macos-services/

[andrewheiss]

Chidi's budget and utility: doing algebra and calculus with R and yacas | Andrew Heiss
http://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2019/10/09/convert-md-rtf-macos-services/

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by johnwhitt on 2019-10-27 15:41:08

Thanks for the post! I found you can pipe to `textutil` rather than
`hexdump`; the added benefit is you can pass the font and so avoid
using a Pandoc template just for this (and it seems cleaner!).

`textutil -stdin -convert html -format rtf -stdout -font helvetica`

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by Dale on 2020-08-02 21:44:14

Thanks for the textutil tip. `-font helvetica` has no effect for me
when converting from HTML on Catalina. textutil(1) says that it only
affects "plain text" conversions, so I'm going to guess that's why.

This works for me:

textutil -format html -convert rtf -stdin -stdout | sed -e '1 s/Times-Roman/Helvetica/; t' -e '1,// s//Helvetica/'

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by Charles on 2020-05-06 10:56:28

Andrew, thank you for this very fine kludge! Works well for me.

@johnwhitt : using textutil is a neat idea too. But I figured the
standalone CSS file is an opportunity to add some colouring for headings
and suchlike. Sizing in pixels (which I don't think textutil can do)
also seems preferable to points when I want to match the rendered text
to my normal composing font in
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app").

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by Dale on 2020-08-03 08:00:02

This is a great post, thank you!

For the benefit of anyone else who tries to use this with
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app"), I ran
into some problems with Pandoc output:

* Current Pandoc tries to put line numbers in fenced code blocks.
Actually, it always outputs a tags on every line, but you only see
numbers if you enable it for a given fenced code block. There seems to
be no way to turn this off. This is a problem in
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app") because
it makes every line look like a link, presumably because
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app") sucks. I
ended up writing a Python script using lxml to remove these a tags.

* [Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app") also
really wants the non-standard (for HTML, not for HTML email, apparently)
type="cite" attribute on every blockquote tag. Again, I used
Python+XML to fix this.

* Finally,
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app")---and
probably many other MUAs---don't read <style> tags, apparently? I
used the Python library
premailer
to inline all styles, so class="foo" gets converted to
style="text-color: red; font-style: italic; your-bandwidth: totally-gone;"
and such. I couldn't get any syntax highlighting to appear in
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app") until I
inlined the styles.

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by Dustin Fife on 2020-08-15 18:13:02

I didn't even know I needed this until today :)

Sorry....just internet stalking you :)

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by Dustin Fife on 2020-09-02 16:31:00

And for those struggling to get syntax highlighting: for some reason,
pandoc isn't syntax highlighting when the R block is specified like
this:

```{r}
#some R code
```

You have to specify it like this:

```r
#some R code
```

Or like this:

```{.r}
#some R code
```

And here's a screenshot if you're trying to do it in keyboard maestro:

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

[andrewheiss]

Originally posted by Charles on 2020-12-23 12:54:20

Anyone having problems using this with
[Mail.app](http://Mail.app "Mail.app") 14.0 on
Big Sur? I've been happily using the script under Mojave (with textutil
as suggested by @johnwhitt). In macOS 11.1 there's a problem: it works
in TextEdit and Scrivener, but in Mail it fails silently.

The problem can't be as simple as this version of Mail somehow becoming
"hardened" against external scripts, because the simple "change
case" example that Andrew uses to introduce the idea of services still
works for me in Mail.