Write using Bear and publish to Medium (with a detour via IA Writer)

A small experiment

Distraction-free and simple writing tools

I am a big fan of IA Writer on iPad and iPhone. It provides a simple and beautiful interface for distraction-free writing. Its integration with DropBox allows me to easily organize the articles in folders when I write on my iPad.

I did a lot of drafting on my iPad and would finalize the story on my laptop. I would copy/paste the text from DropBox into Medium and complete the formatting within Medium. It was a little tedious process.

More recent versions allow you to import articles directly from IA Writer into Medium. In the process, Markdown formatting is converted to HTML.

Recently M.G. Siegler, a prolific writer, raved about Bear . It is hailed as one of Apple’s Apps of the Year for 2016. It has some nifty features, such as using hashtags to organize your writings. However, I miss an integration with Medium.

An experiment

Since I already have a tool which understands Markdown and can import to Medium, I tried a simple experiment.

1. Write in Bear Writer (on my laptop)
2. Save to Drop Box in Markdown format
3. Open the file in IA Writer on my iPhone or iPad
4. Import from IA Writer into Medium

(Of course, if I had purchased IA Writer for Mac, I didn’t need to jump through these hoops. But that’s not the point. It is more an experiment in how well you can migrate between these simple writing tools.)

The experiment is successful if the Markdown formatting is preserved throughout the process.

Results

Overall the workflow worked well. I only observed a few small issues:

• The first H2 heading was imported as a subtitle to the article. That was easy to fix.
• The file name bear2medium shows up as the article title. You can fix this through Customize title / subtitle option in Medium.

If anyone knows of other (free) tools which allow you to import Markdown formatted text into Medium, let me know.