Support CommonMark syntax

[xgouchet]

Currently ReText gives the option to use Markdown, Textile and reStructured Text. It would be great to be compliant with CommonMark (which is a kind of standardized version of Markdown)

[mitya57]

Out of curiosity: what the the syntax features that are present in CommonMark that you miss with the current implementation? I am quite sure there are Python-Markdown extensions that implement the syntax you need.

That said, I can add the CommonMark markup, but I am not going to reassign the standard file extensions (.mkd, .md, .markdown) to it, so all current files will still load using Python-Markdown.

[xgouchet]

It's not so much mssing syntax feature, rather than having a standard syntax across several systems.

There are lots of different markdown flavor, based on website and parsers, and CommonMark actually have a spec on how to write syntax.

I understand the problem with the file extension, maybe you could add a user preference to choose between python markdown / common mark ?

[keesse]

I agree with xgouchet, that would be nice, a lot of other applications also support both. E.g. a '\' instead of ' ' at the end of a line is more visable (allthough ReText prints grey spaces, not all other editors do).

[lofidevops]

Some additional comments (just putting these links here for reference):

• ReText currently relies on Python-Markdown which will never support CommonMark (see https://github.com/Python-Markdown/markdown/issues/338 and https://github.com/Python-Markdown/markdown/issues/545 )
• CommonMark-py is a Python implementation of CommonMark; https://github.com/retext-project/pymarkups/pull/2 is an incomplete attempt to provide it as an alternate backend

[matkoniecz]

Out of curiosity: what the the syntax features that are present in CommonMark that you miss with the current implementation? I am quite sure there are Python-Markdown extensions that implement the syntax you need.

In some cases CommonsMark and ReText gives different rendering, so I need to make changes like https://github.com/colouring-london/colouring-london/commit/b07de223b124fa18cd2373294b627c51edfb9d7f just because ReText is displaying it brokenly.

Specifically:

This repository will contain open-source code for the project which:
- stores building footprint polygons and source metadata
- allows site users to record building attribute data

is shown as list on GitHub that is using CommonsMark and not in ReText that is using MarkDown.

https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?text=This+repository+will+contain+open-source+code+for+the+project+which%3A%0A-+stores+building+footprint+polygons+and+source+metadata%0A-+allows+site+users+to+record+building+attribute+data

[mitya57]

As I said earlier,

I am quite sure there are Python-Markdown extensions that implement the syntax you need.

And here is an extension for your case:

https://github.com/adamb70/mdx-breakless-lists

[matkoniecz]

@mitya57 How one may use them in ReText? I see no obvious way to achieve this.

[mitya57]

There are multiple ways to enable extensions, as described in the wiki: https://github.com/retext-project/retext/wiki/Markdown-extensions.

• Directly in document by adding <!-- Required extensions: mdx_breakless_lists --> as first line.
• markdown-extensions.txt or markdown-extensions.yaml in the document directory.
• markdown-extensions.txt or markdown-extensions.yaml in your user ~/.config.

And of course you need to install the extension, in this case pip3 install mdx-breakless-lists.