Short story: I'm using Markdown to write a novel. Long story is here. In this site I typo-check the text using a Perl module (which I also developed), but I'd like to check MD syntax too. However, most markdown tool seem to be too lenient on errors, letting go stuff like this
This is an *error
This would be [another error](
Besides, there is no "check-only" option that returns false when there's an error, so that it can be used in continuous integration tests. The only one that balks out in this stuff is maruku. Kramdown, pandoc, marked, markdown (for nodejs), all of them let it go without a glitch.
Question is, is there a markdown syntax validator or checker in any language I can use easily in CI? Or should I go with maruku, despite being considered obsolete by his authors?
As pointed out in this answer, "it is impossible to write "invalid" markdown only markdown that wont do what you want it to." Every string is valid markdown.
You could, however define a subset of markdown that excludes markdown like the examples you mentioned in the question, and modify an existing parser to adhere to that subset.
Related
I'm currently in process of making site i18n-aware. Marking hardcoded strings as translatable.
I wonder if there's any automated tool that would let me browse the site and quickly see which strings are marked and which still aren't. I saw a few projects like django-i18n-helper that try to highlight translated strings using HTML facilities, but this doesn't work well with JavaScript.
So I thought FДЦЖ CУЯILLIC, 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 or ʇxǝʇ uʍop-ǝpısdn (or something along those lines) should do the trick. Easy to distinguish visually, still readable, yet doesn't depend on any rich text formatting besides Unicode support.
The problem is, I can't find any readily-available tool that'd eat gettext .po/.pot file(s) and spew out such translation. Still, I think the idea is pretty obvious, so there must be something out there, already.
In my case I'm using Python/Django, but I suppose this question applies to anything that uses gettext-compatible library. The only thing the tool should be aware of, is that there could be HTML fragments in translation strings.
The msgfilter program will let you run your translations through any program you want. It works especially well with GNU sed.
For example, to turn all your translations into uppercase (HTML is mostly case-insensitive, so this should work):
msgfilter -i django.po sed -e 's/\(.*\)/\U\1/'
The only strings in your app that have lowercase letters in them would then be the hardcoded ones.
If you really want to do faux cyrillic, you just have to write a program or script that reads Latin and outputs that, and feed that program to msgfilter instead of sed.
If your distribution has a talkfilters package, it might provide a few programs that might be useful in this specific case. All of these should work as msgfilter filters. (My personal favorite is chef. Bork bork bork!)
Haven't tried this myself yet, but found podebug tool from Translate Toolkit. Based on documentation (flipped and unicode rewrite options), this looks exactly the tool I wished for.
I'm working on a book which had a couple of people writing and editing the text. Everything is Markdown. Unfortunately, there is a mix of different styles and lines widths. Technically this isn't a problem but it's not nice in terms of aesthetics.
What is the best way to reformat those files in e.g. GitHub markdown style? Is there a shell script for this job?
You might want to look at Pandoc; it understands several flavors of Markdown.
pandoc -f markdown -t gfm foobar.md
Having written a markup converter years ago in Perl, I would not want to approach such a task without a decent lexical analyzer, which is a bit beyond shell scripting.
I wrote a tool called tidy-markdown that will reformat any Markdown (including GFM) according to this styleguide.
$ tidy-markdown < ./ugly-markdown.md > ./clean-markdown.md
It handles conversion of inline HTML to Markdown, normalization of syntactic elements like code blocks (converting them to fenced), lists, block-quotes, front-matter, headers, and will even attempt to standardize code-block language identifiers.
Is there is list of the markdown tags supported by the redcarpet gem?
For example, some markdown implementations support centering text, some don't. Rather than trial and error experimentation, it seems like such a popular gem would be documented somewhere?
I don't think redcarpet is responsible for the markdown - it's simply a renderer; it uses some libraries to interpret the required code
After some research, it seems all of the markdown interpreters are originally based on the UpSkirt library, which was derived from this Daring Fireball project:
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown
allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text
format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax;
and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text
formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to
Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the
online Dingus.
You can find the sytnax here
I am using git-wiki for my personal note storage. It works very well, except that WikiWords are converted to links before the markdown parsing stage, using a regular expression. This messes up scores of things, for instance links that point to outside wiki pages, or block quotes (if I am quoting something, I do not want a WikiWord to be changed into a link).
Are there ruby-based Markdown parsers that understand WikiLinks?
The best parser around is the C-based one (upskirt/sundown), whose ruby iteration is red carpet:
https://github.com/tanoku/redcarpet
It is better for performance and security reasons.
For the wiki links, pre-process them before sending your text to the markdown parser.
I'm currently using BlueCloth to process Markdown in Ruby and show it as HTML, but in one location I need it as plain text (without some of the Markdown). Is there a way to achieve that?
Is there a markdown-to-plain-text method? Is there an html-to-plain-text method that I could feel the result of BlueCloth?
RedCarpet gem has a Redcarpet::Render::StripDown renderer which "turns Markdown into plaintext".
Copy and modify it to suit your needs.
Or use it like this:
Redcarpet::Markdown.new(Redcarpet::Render::StripDown).render(markdown)
Converting HTML to plain text with Ruby is not a problem, but of course you'll lose all markup. If you only want to get rid of some of the Markdown syntax, it probably won't yield the result you're looking for.
The bottom line is that unrendered Markdown is intended to be used as plain text, therefore converting it to plain text doesn't really make sense. All Ruby implementations that I have seen follow the same interface, which does not offer a way to strip syntax (only including to_html, and text, which returns the original Markdown text).
It's not ruby, but one of the formats Pandoc now writes is 'plain'. Here's some arbitrary markdown:
# My Great Work
## First Section
Here we discuss my difficulties with [Markdown](http://wikipedia.org/Markdown)
## Second Section
We begin with a quote:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident ...
then some code:
#! /usr/bin/bash
That's *all*.
(Not sure how to turn off the syntax highlighting!) Here's the associated 'plain':
My Great Work
=============
First Section
-------------
Here we discuss my difficulties with Markdown
Second Section
--------------
We begin with a quote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident ...
then some code:
#! /usr/bin/bash
That's all.
You can get an idea what it does with the different elements it parses out of documents from the definition of plainify in pandoc/blob/master/src/Text/Pandoc/Writers/Markdown.hs in the Github repository; there is also a tutorial that shows how easy it is to modify the behavior.