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Re: generic viewer for md files



Quoting Jerome BENOIT (2022-01-24 12:46:40)
> On 24/01/2022 12:10, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > Quoting Jerome BENOIT (2022-01-24 10:36:50)
> >> is there a virtual package for viewing MD documents
> >> (as the virtual package pdf-viewer is for PDF documents) ?
[...]
> > Why do you ask? Because you are looking for markdown viewers or 
> > because you are packaging one and want to declare it as such, or...?
> 
> I am asking because a software that I am currently packaging has its 
> documents in MarDown (GitHub flavour, I guess).
> 
> So my understanding now is that there is no point to look for a 
> generic MD viewer.
> 
> Therefore I am now considering to convert them in PDF and/or HTML 
> documents.

It is quite common nowadays for software projects to ship at least core 
documentation in (github- or Gitlab-flavored) Markdown (or CommonMark, a 
non-sloppy spec'ed slight subset of Markdown).

As others replying here have indicated, the easiest is to ship such 
files as-is, assuming that the reader is geeky enough to read it raw.

Personally I am of the opinion that more ideally such documentation 
should be treated as a source format with two targets - html and 
plaintext - and that both those target formats should be generated 
during package build and installed with the binary package(s).

For Github-flavored Markdown I recommend to render both target formats 
using the command-line tool cmark-gfm.  Here is an example of that: 
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/doctest/-/commit/d9b848b

For most other flavors of Markdown I recommend to render using pandoc. 
Here is an example of that: 
https://salsa.debian.org/js-team/twitter-bootstrap3/-/commit/f138bf1

For Gitlab-flavored Markdown there are currently no parser in Debian, 
but depending on the actual markup used you might get away with pandoc + 
a filter (but may then give up on rendering as plaintext).  Here is an 
example of that: 
https://salsa.debian.org/matrix-team/olm/-/commit/094396d

Feel free to reach out if you need help juggling Markdown or using 
pandoc.  I am no expert, but am interested, and am in touch with the 
author if all else fails ;-)


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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