Fletcher Penney released version 4.5 of MultiMarkdown today, which brings several improvements and some great new features. MultiMarkdown has become the standard for many of the best text editors on iOS and OS X, and Fletcher is constantly updating it (alongside his app, MultiMardown Composer) to keep up with the times.

The new version comes with support for what he calls “File Transclusion”. MultiMarkdown can now include the contents of a file inside another file – think of document hyperlinks, done in plain text. From the docs:

Transclusion is recursive, so the file being inserted will be scanned to see if it references any other files.

Metadata in the file being inserted will be ignored. This means that the file can contain certain metadata when viewed alone that will not be included when the file is transcluded by another file.

This is a powerful addition for writers who have been looking for an easy way to reference files and group their contents together – now Transclusion happens directly before the processing step, with MMD taking care of scanning files and even additional links within those files. The obvious implementation would be to write a book or academic paper in plain text, keeping chapters as separate files in a folder and referencing their file names in the Table of Contents. There are many possibilities and I can’t wait to see this being included in some iOS text editors.

You can download the latest MultiMarkdown here.