Installation
The plugin will work with versions as far back as build 133.1711, which is version 13.0 of IDEA. For standard HTML Preview rendering you can just install and use it. See Installation Procedure
The plugin implements two HTML Preview renderers: old JEditorPane with HTMLEditorKit and new JavaFx WebView based preview. The JEditorPane preview is lightning fast and will run on JDK as old as 1.6 but has many HTML and CSS parsing limitations that make it impossible to get close to GitHub look and it was born long before retina displays were invented. Some of its elements look jagged on retina displays. That said, it will show the result but not exactly like GitHub. The JavaFx WebView based renderer is close to browser HTML, CSS and JavaScript implementation, retina aware but it does require that your IDE's boot JDK is 1.8.0u40 or later and is not a 'speed demon'. It does look good.
You can install the plugin two different ways:
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download the plugin from IntelliJ MultiMarkdown plugin page and install it from disk via Settings > Plugins and clicking on Install plugin from disk...
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Go to Settings > Plugins and clicking on Browse Repositories...
- Select MultiMarkdown from the list of plugins. You can type 'markdown' into the search field to limit the list of plugins.
- In the right hand information panel click the install button
.
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Restart the IDE
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You should see the MultiMarkdown icon
on all Markdown files in your project.
To get the new preview tab you need to configure your IDEA to use JDK 1.8 that includes jfxrt.jar in the jdk's lib/ext directory, which is its standard location. If jfxrt.jar is not found or the plugin cannot create the new editor class, it will fall back to using the JEditorPane with HTMLEditorKit preview. You can also disable using JavaFX based preview in plugin settings, for those that prefer to keep using the old preview.
You cannot get the new preview if the boot JDK is the IDEA bundled JDK, which does not include jfxrt.jar nor the native libraries that it uses.
To change the boot JDK please refer to the Changing Boot JDK instructions.
If you installed the plugin but are experiencing problems please see the Troubleshooting JavaFx WebView guide.