penman

You write markdown. You paste it somewhere. It looks like garbage.

Penman fixes that. Give it markdown and a target (Slack, Word, Gmail, whatever), and it puts styled rich text on your clipboard. Cmd+V. Done. Code blocks have syntax highlighting. Tables have borders. Headings look like headings. Fonts match what the app actually uses.

Install

From the RTD marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add ryanthedev/rtd-claude-inn
/plugin install penman@rtd

Then run /penman:install to pull dependencies and seed ~/.penman.json5 (needs Bun).

After updates, re-run /penman:install — the cached plugin path changes with each version.

Usage

/penman:pen --slack
/penman:pen --teams ./notes.md
/penman:pen --word --dark

Pass a platform flag. Optionally pass a file or inline text. If you leave something out, it asks.

There's also a CLI if you want it:

penman --for slack < notes.md
penman --for word --theme dark notes.md

MCP tools

Three tools Claude can call directly:

• penman — convert and copy to clipboard
• penman_html — convert and return the HTML (doesn't touch clipboard)
• penman_platforms — list what's available

Platforms

Each one has its own font stack, sizes, and colors matched to what the app uses natively. Slack gets Lato at 15px. Word gets Calibri at 11pt. Gmail gets Arial at 14px. And so on.

How it works

Three steps:

1. Tokens — pick the right fonts, colors, and code styling for the platform and theme (light/dark). User overrides from ~/.penman.json5 get merged in.
2. Render — marked parses the markdown, highlight.js handles syntax highlighting, and everything gets inline style attributes. No <style> blocks. Every paste target strips those.
3. Clipboard — hex-encode the HTML, set it via osascript as «class HTML» with a plain-text fallback.

Chat vs. document rendering

Slack, Teams, and Discord strip most HTML structure on paste. <h1> becomes nothing. <p> collapses. <table> dumps cell contents inline. So penman renders chat platforms differently: <strong> for headings, <br> for spacing, text-aligned tables inside <pre> blocks.

Document and email platforms (Word, Notion, Outlook, Gmail) get real semantic HTML with explicit inline styles on every element. Absolute pt/px font sizes, not em.

Custom tokens

Override anything globally or per-platform in ~/.penman.json5:

{
  "tokens": {
    "codeFontFamily": "Fira Code, monospace"
  },
  "platforms": {
    "slack": {
      "tokens": { "fontFamily": "Inter, sans-serif" }
    }
  }
}

Run penman --for <platform> --tokens to see what's available.

Requirements

• macOS (clipboard uses osascript and textutil)
• Bun

License

ISC