An automated workflow for scientific writing on Medium
How to upload Markdown files to Medium while maintaining tables, syntax highlighting, math typesetting, and footnotes.
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Medium is an excellent platform for blogging and it has increasingly become a go-to source of knowledge on data science and other technical topics.
Unfortunately, though, the writing experience on Medium for scientific topics isn’t great: there’s no support for tables, code syntax highlighting, math typesetting, or footnotes — all pretty essential elements for many posts.
I’m not the first person to run into this issue, either. A few searches for keyword phrases like “medium math formula” demonstrate how widespread the issue really is:
- How to write mathematics on Medium, Writing Math (LaTeX) Formulas in Medium, and How to Embed Beautiful Math equations in Medium all describe multi-step workflows for including math typesetting. Essentially, you write your equations in other software, convert them to images, and then copy the images into your post.
- Undocumented Medium Formatting Tricks describes an even more convoluted process for including internally-linked footnotes: you have to inspect the HTML source of a post, copy
nameattributes, and then manually create each link. - 5 Tips for Embedding Tables in Your Medium Posts and How to Share Beautiful Tables on your Medium Articles describe having to copy-and-paste tables into code blocks, include screenshots of your tables, or use third-party “embed” functionality.
While these are all useful articles in their own right, none of the proposed solutions were particularly appealing to me.
What if I want to write a typical Markdown post once and have it “just work” on Medium?
Well, now you can.
Introducing pb, an open-source CLI tool
pb is an open-source, command-line tool designed to facilitate a multi-platform, scientific publishing workflow.
The idea is pretty simple: you write your post locally using your favorite Markdown editor, such as VS Code or Typora, and then use pb to upload it to…
