
Visdown – Visualization using Markdown - rouse
http://visdown.amitkaps.com/
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meesterdude
I like the idea of adding visualizations to markdown. I think its got
potential. But this implementation is entirely wrong. I could never include it
server side or client side because the data source is decoupled. Additionally,
the setup reads 10X more like something i'd write for javascript than for
markdown.

To be in the spirit of markdown, you would have to do something like take a
csv or table of numbers, and make them into a chart -in a way that you can
read in plaintext too.

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katzgrau
I'd agree, and this is what I was hinting at in my comment as well.

Plain-text readability is paramount. But additionally, we need to be careful
as to how visualizations are implemented. _The visual characteristics of the
final HTML document are really supposed to exist in the domain of the
stylesheet applied to it._

The visualization configuration block in OP's example is perilously close, if
not guilty, of violating the traditional separation of concerns we expect with
Markdown.

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katzgrau
Interesting, but in a weird way it kind of works against the whole point of
Markdown - markup that emphasizes text-only readability.

I think visualizations are best left to separate projects that specialize in
them - which in turn generate images that can be placed in a Markdown
document.

Of course, if anyone finds this useful (obviously the author does) I would
never discourage it. I'm simply trying to reconcile this with what I
personally believe the main purpose of Markdown to be.

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empath75
There's already a syntax to inline images:
[https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#img](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#img)

I'm not sure what the benefit of doing it this way is supposed to be.

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katzgrau
Right, I'm basically saying the a separate service / utility would generate
the image which would, in-turn, be placed in a markdown doc.

An inline image, as unnatural as it might appear in a markdown doc (as the DF
post notes) is more "readable" in plain-text than what is essentially a block
of YAML for configuring a chart in the middle of a document.

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sharpercoder
I really want to have an extendable Markdown. A standard mechanism for
expressing a used extension and providing an implementation for the Markdown
processor to apply a transformation.

This standardization can then result in much improved support for Markdown
editors. Think autocomplete for any extended item which works on any Markdown
editor.

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camoy
I've tried to do this here:
[https://github.com/camoy/lark](https://github.com/camoy/lark)

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closed
This looks more like "Visualization using html code blocks".

(but I really the idea of using it with Markdown!)

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baotiao
It's really awesome.

For a system engineer, it's hard to draw visual csv file by java script.
markdown is the most simple and convenient tool, it's a good idea to combine
markdown with visualization.

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nunez
This is incredibly, incredibly useful! Thank you!

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RobinL
It'd be amazing to see a combination of this with R Markdown

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throwaway161220
If you're using Emacs and org-mode, look into org-babel which supports R among
many other inline languages (C, Haskell, sh, SQL, ....) you can use as if you
were in iPython.

