Hacker News Reader

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Theoretically. Unfortunately, Markdown has many potential ambiguities in interpretation, and unintuitive aspects.

Especially for GitHub, I don't want to iteratively push commit after commit to README.md just to get the correct syntax for their GitHub-Flavored-Markdown. When editing on GitHub directly, I appreciate the preview to spot mistakes.

However, there are many downsides of using the website for editing (like you can't combine changes to multiple files in a single commit). I prefer using a real editor locally, but using any other Markdown processor might give slightly different results. Therefore I use flavor [1] to filter the Markdown document through the GitHub API for reviewing it locally before pushing.

[1] http://brettterpstra.com/2012/09/16/easy-command-line-github...

Why not just use Pandoc with GFM syntax options?

flavor also includes CSS rules that closely resemble the design of GitHub, so I can view the result in my local browser as it would look on the GitHub website. With pandoc, I only get plain HTML output.

I wrote mup [1] to help with this: it is a markup previewer. It support multiple markup formats and for markdown multiple markdown implementations: pandoc, commonmark, kramdown, python-markdown and also previewing using GitHub API (slow but the most reliable for README.md editing)

[1]: https://github.com/agateau/mup

grip (on pypi) is also pretty good, and can serve rendered HTML on its own.

That is why initiatives like Commonmark (http://commonmark.org/) exists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com