My first post here, but I have been using UE/UC for many many years. I have spent quite a while trying to get a very stubborn Markdown Live Preview to work on my machine. Everything looked like it should work, but the Live Preview window was blank. I raised a support ticket (no result from that yet). Anyway, I have found out the problem:
- Symptom
UltraEdit's Live Preview pane opens when clicking the Live Preview button in the Coding tab, but displays a blank white pane for markdown files. The status bar correctly shows Markdown as the syntax highlighting language. Markdown is in the wordfile directory and the drop-down in the Coding tab shows Markdown. The syntax highlighting in the source file works correctly.
- Diagnosis
UltraEdit generates a temporary HTML file (e.g. 0YOURFILE.html) from the markdown source as an intermediate step before rendering it in the preview pane. Inspecting this file revealed that the <article> body was completely empty, meaning the markdown-to-HTML conversion was silently failing, not the rendering.
UltraEdit uses cmark-gfm.exe (located in C:\Program Files\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraEdit\GNU\) to perform the markdown conversion. Running this executable directly produced no output and returned exit code -1073741701 (0xC000007B - STATUS_INVALID_IMAGE_FORMAT), confirming it could not start.
- Root Cause
cmark-gfm.exe is a 32-bit (x86) executable that depends on the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime. Neither the x86 nor x64 Visual C++ Redistributable was installed on the machine, so the executable failed to load its required DLLs and exited silently every time UltraEdit called it.
- Solution
Install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable — x86 version.
The x86 version is specifically required because cmark-gfm.exe is a 32-bit binary. The x64 version alone is not sufficient.
Download from: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x86.exe
After installation, cmark-gfm.exe runs correctly and Live Preview renders markdown as expected.