What's new

1.0.9 — 2026-08-26

• MediaWiki documents keep their formulas and their code blocks. Anything a wiki writes as a tag — a <math> formula, a <syntaxhighlight> code block — simply vanished from the preview, with no error and no gap to notice: the reader of a Wikipedia article pasted into Markzen saw the prose and none of the mathematics. Formulas now render exactly as they do in every other markup language, inline in a sentence or displayed on their own line as the article asks, and a highlighted code block arrives with its language intact.
• Double-clicking a wiki or BBCode file opens it in Markzen. The installer registered most of the markup files Markzen reads, but not .wiki, .mediawiki, .wikitext or .bb — so those four opened in whatever else the system had, or nothing at all. All fifteen extensions across the eight languages are now offered.
• Turning a pasted address into a link takes one keystroke. Select an address and press Ctrl+K: it becomes the link's destination, and the cursor waits in the empty field for what the link should say. Previously the address became the link's visible text, leaving you to retype it. File paths work the same way.
• The {{label:lblHdrConvertTo}} menu is grouped by what you are making — ebooks, word processor, presentation, typesetting, and so on — instead of one long list to scan. Each markup language now appears once, under {{label:lblHdrConvertMarkup}}; MediaWiki had been listed twice, in two places, producing the same file from both.

1.0.8 — 2026-08-23

• Mermaid diagrams that refused to draw now render. Many came back as Syntax error in text even though the same source was accepted everywhere else — in one test document, eighteen of twenty. Markzen was handing each diagram to Mermaid through the page itself, which rewrote the text on the way through — decoding escapes, stripping indentation — and quietly mangled anything that looked like markup: a <br/> in a mindmap, an   in a block diagram. The exact text of your fenced code block now reaches Mermaid untouched.
• The diagram size and alignment panel changes the block you are pointing at. It used to locate a block by counting how many times its language appeared in your source, while the preview counted only the blocks it had actually turned into diagrams. In a document that shows a fenced code block of the same language as an example — a page explaining Mermaid, say — the two counts drifted apart and every change landed on the diagram before the one under the cursor. The panel now identifies the block by its own content.
• File pickers open where you last were. Opening a document, or browsing for an image, had started in the Downloads folder every time. Markzen now remembers the folder you last picked from — separately for documents and for images — and returns there, including after a restart.
• The update notice links to the right pages, in your language. Its {{label:lnkUpdateWhatsNew}} link pointed at a page the website no longer publishes, so it led nowhere; both of its links also sent you to English unless you read one of four languages. They now open the current release notes and download pages in your own language wherever it exists.

1.0.7 — 2026-08-17

• Markzen now opens almost immediately. Nearly forty rendering engines used to load at launch, whether or not the document needed them — several seconds of waiting paid by everyone who opened a plain text file. Each engine is now fetched the first time a document actually asks for it, so startup is near-instant and only the first diagram of a given kind takes a moment to appear. The libraries only exporting uses now load when you export, and the interface loads the one language you read instead of all fifty.
• Box-drawing characters survive in code blocks. A directory tree or an ASCII diagram pasted into a code block used to break into gaps, because the web versions of most monospace fonts quietly leave those characters out. Markzen now ships JetBrains Mono and Source Code Pro with the app instead of fetching them, which also means they work on a machine with no connection. Cascadia Code and Fira Code are replaced by Cascadia Mono and Fira Mono, the ligature-free versions of the same fonts — a ligature redraws != as a single ≠, which is pleasant while writing code and wrong in a document meant to show what the file actually says. DM Mono is no longer offered; there is no build of it that carries the characters.
• The code font travels inside the exported file. A PDF or HTML export used to fall back to whatever font the reader's machine had, so a diagram that lined up on your screen could arrive misaligned. The font is now embedded in the export itself. The editor pane also uses the same font as the preview, so what you type, what you preview and what you export finally agree.
• Style and fonts moved into one panel. The style template and the three font pickers used to occupy four separate toolbar controls; they now sit together, each with its own label, behind a single {{label:tipHdrAppearance}} button.

1.0.6 — 2026-08-07

• BBCode is now the eighth markup language Markzen reads. Open a .bbcode file and edit it with live preview like any other document, or convert an existing document to BBCode when a forum post is the destination. BBCode has never had a single standard — every forum invented its own variant — so Markzen reads it generously: it accepts the common spellings side by side and leaves any tag it doesn't recognise visible as plain text instead of quietly dropping it.
• Insert a table from the toolbar. Sweep across a small grid to pick the number of rows and columns, and Markzen writes an empty table of that size in the document's own markup — Markdown, AsciiDoc, Org, Textile, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, Djot or BBCode — ready to type into. Pasting a block of spreadsheet cells still produces a table the same way.
• The Convert menu's submenus can be opened again. Ebooks, Word Processor, Presentation and the rest were unreachable: the submenu was drawn inside the menu's own scrolling area, which cut it out of view entirely, so nothing appeared when you moved onto one of those rows.
• Menus now use the height the window actually has. They were capped at a fixed size and scrolled even on a tall window, hiding entries behind a scrollbar for no reason.
• Moving down a menu no longer leaves a trail of open submenus. Each one used to linger for a moment after you had already moved to the next, so several could sit on screen at once.

1.0.5 — 2026-08-03

• Command-line exports no longer leave a temporary folder behind in the system temp directory after every run. Each export now clears out the leftovers of earlier exports that have finished, so a habit of exporting from the command line stops quietly filling up your temp folder.

1.0.4 — 2026-07-24

• Insert links and images from dedicated toolbar buttons (or Ctrl+K for a link): a small popup at the cursor writes the correct markup for the document's own format, across all seven markup languages.
• Choose whether an image is linked (the document points at a file or URL) or embedded (the image's bytes are stored inside the document, so the file is fully self-contained and portable).
• Edit an existing link or image in place — put the cursor on it and reopen the popup, and it loads the current text and address and replaces the whole construct instead of nesting a new one.
• Embedded images no longer clutter the editor: each base64 image folds into a compact chip showing its type and size, while the underlying document text stays intact.

1.0.3 — 2026-07-23

• Command-line exports now run in batch: pass several source -o output pairs in one call and a single launch renders them all — around 2 seconds per document instead of a full app start (~15 s) each.

1.0.2 — 2026-07-21

• Code blocks in AsciiDoc documents no longer get mangled when they contain literal math delimiters like \(...\) — math rendering now skips code, so a regex or LaTeX example displays as written.

1.0.1 — 2026-07-19

• Switching between open files now brings you back exactly where you were — each tab remembers its editor scroll position and text selection.
• Each tab keeps its own live preview: scroll position, images and rendered diagrams survive tab switches, and switching back is instant.
• Clicking a chapter in the table of contents now moves the editor there on the first click, not the second.
• Table-of-contents and in-page link clicks now always act on the active tab's preview, never on another open file's.

1.0.0 — 2026-07-15

• Initial release