
Markdeep - haakon
http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
======
falcolas
Funny enough, browsing without Javascript resulted in the same plain text
appearing in both windows. I was nearly ready to comment about how easy that
is with a pair of <pre> tags. :)

That said, I'm OK with it degrading like that. The text file is perfectly
readable, and conveys the information within quite well. I even kind of
preferred it.

So, yeah. Great job, OP.

~~~
hoorayimhelping
How can you tell if someone browses the web with JavaScript disabled?

Oh don't worry. They'll let you know. Any chance they get.

~~~
andrewstuart2
A vegan, a crossfitter, an atheist, a crypto nerd, and a javascript disabler
walk into a bar...

~~~
endergen
Same person?

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ajarmst
I don't get it. Why would I do diagrams in ascii when I can use any one of
dozens of good programs and export the result via DVI or PDF. I guess it must
might be nice if I want to read the document on a text console, but I don't
see that use case coming up nearly often enough to justify learning yet
another version of markdown and commit to doing diagrams with ascii art.

~~~
quanticle
Version control. If I add an ASCII art diagram to a text document, I can git
diff it, and see that the ASCII art diagram was added. If my documentation is
is in PDF, I can keep it in version control, but I lose a lot of the
advantages that version control provides because PDF is a binary format.

~~~
JupiterMoon
But if you create the pdf using a script (e.g. latex tikz) then this is in
your version control instead.

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dd0dd
I think org-mode can do that too (and much more I guess).

[http://home.fnal.gov/~neilsen/notebook/orgExamples/org-
examp...](http://home.fnal.gov/~neilsen/notebook/orgExamples/org-
examples.html#sec-5)

~~~
amelius
How popular is it? Will this ever catch on?

------
dingdingdang
Combine with [http://asciiflow.com/](http://asciiflow.com/) and ascii heaven
comes closer ;)

~~~
joonoro
Don't forget artist-mode! [http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-
artist.html](http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-artist.html)

------
zobzu
RST could do this - but I like Markdeep's simplified way (no "directives")

Now if all editors could come up with a compatible ascii graphic drawing tool
that would actually be useable.

~~~
a3n
I think all editors can read in the results of an external program, which
might be a better solution. For example, the par text reformatter. Vim doesn't
know a thing about it, but it will feed selected text to it, and replace it
with results.

So for ascii diagrams, you might have an external program that generates, at
least, various kinds of boxes and connectors, then you could edit the labels
from the editor. Bonus if the external ascii diagram generator would take
labels associated with entities.

Maybe that's an additional feature for Markdeep, or maybe it's a specific itch
for someone else to scratch.

------
TeeWEE
Nice setup, but its very cumbersome to write graphs in ascii, i prefer DOT if
i dont care about layout too much, otherwise i use gliffy or something like
that. For simple diagrams this is nice. However i think the main reason to use
this is not diagrams. However then i think its better to use Markdown since
most people know that.

~~~
olegp
There's ASCIIFlow for that: [http://asciiflow.com/](http://asciiflow.com/)

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thristian
The author seems very proud of the automatic-rendering JS they've written, and
it's kind of cute but personally I'd much rather a batch-conversion tool.

On the other hand, that ASCII-art-to-SVG conversion is golden, and I'd
absolutely love to have that supported in my API docs and blog-posts.

~~~
adevine
It would probably be trivial to pre-process the text with the script if you
wanted to - at the end of the day it has to just be outputting DOM elements.

I for one love that it doesn't require a preprocessing step, because it means
that any text file can easily be rendered without any need to do anything
else.

Fantastic job OP, I think this is really awesome. Would be perfect if this was
integrated with github - I would do all my readmes with this.

------
jbclements
After 10 seconds of inspection: no, not a good idea, don't think this solves a
nice problem.

Speaking as a PL & s-exp guy, I don't really have a problem writing

(bullets (item "pick up milk") (item "drop off desk"))

... but at the end of the day, I see that I can convey the same structure in a
clearer way using markdown. Markdown is lovely because it's the _thinnest
possible skin_ over the structure; you can immediately see what structure the
syntax is attaching. (Yes, there's still some parsing nastiness around
paragraphs). This thing, though, doesn't have that "brilliant solution to a
simple but really important problem" feel to it. I don't see this catching on.

Of course, I said the same thing about the internet in the spring of 1993.

------
kbd
So frustrating that both Markdown and this don't support underlines.

~~~
treve
I don't think this is the right way to look at this. They both transform to
the most sensible html given the input.

If you want to use an underline for emphasis instead of cursive, this is more
of a style concern than anything else, so the appropriate place to change this
would be in the stylesheet, which is perfectly possible.

If you specifically want it to output the <u> html tag, I agree that this is
not as convenient.

~~~
grimman
> They both transform to the most sensible html given the input.

I'm going to have to disagree with you. Long before Markdown came along, the
convention was to use asterisks for * bold *, slashes for /italics/ and
underscores for _underlined_ text. And that's just for starters.

Those three examples perfectly convey the intended effect, quite unlike the
Markdown versions where asterisks will somehow imply italics, but only if
they're single asterisks? It's a strange thing!

~~~
treve
The point is that bold, italics, underline are all a property of the style,
but not intent. The intent is "emphasis". How emphasis is rendered is
dependent on the stylesheet.

~~~
kayamon
If the intent is simply "emphasis", why are there different ways of expressing
it?

------
juliend2
The ASCII to graph feature reminds me of
[https://github.com/knsv/mermaid](https://github.com/knsv/mermaid) .

But I like the more WYSIWYG approach (if I dare say) of Markdeep.

------
jabbernotty
I am thinking of using this for my personal website. It has been a while since
I have had to think about licenses, and I am having trouble thinking this one
through.

 _Markdeep is open source. You may use, extend, and redistribute Markdeep
without charge under the terms of the BSD license: ... Markdeep includes
markdown.js, so you are also bound by the MIT license (which is BSD-
compatible): ... ...and the highlight.js BSD license:_

If I understand correctly that means I have to serve all three licenses in my
HTML?

~~~
kayamon
Presumably you don't have to serve _any_ licenses - the license should be in
the Javascript file itself?

(disclaimer: I didn't check)

------
tobinharris
Nice, you could also do something to embed [http://yuml.me](http://yuml.me)
diagrams for converting text into diagrams?

------
jakeva
Might want to make sure you spell your inspiration's name correctly (ie, not
Grubber)

~~~
FraaJad
he also spelled github as githib, so Gruber's name might also be intentional.

~~~
Schwolop
Two wrongs don't make a right...

------
paulpauper
the ability to turn txt into a diagram is intriguing

~~~
joepvd
Absolutely fricking cool. Would need to learn some extra text editor tricks,
however, to make it a smooth experience...

~~~
roel_v
DrawIt for Vim:
[http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40)
. I think I started using this in the previous millennium, and if not, not
much later. It's awesome. Not all (former) coworkers agree with that sentiment
though, to be honest.

~~~
joepvd
Thanks for your suggestions, roel_v and a_e_k! Will play around with DrawIt,
looks fun!

~~~
roel_v
Two other tools that render images from ascii are ditaa
([http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/](http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/)) and plantuml
([http://plantuml.com/](http://plantuml.com/)). Those tools, some scripts to
render and combine markdown and images, and DrawIt (+ some other vim tools
like 'boxes' (not sure if that still has a web page), 'sketch.vim' and
'boxdraw') make for the least painful, versionable documentation system, for
me. ('least painful' in the sense that I still need to code way too much to
get it all to work, but there isn't anything ready-made and stable enough that
I have been able to find the last decade).

------
sumitgt
Where exactly is the source code?

~~~
detaro
[http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/markdeep.min.js](http://casual-
effects.com/markdeep/markdeep.min.js)

+

> _The current 0.01 beta release is minified-only to find bugs and get
> feedback, but a full source version is coming soon after some more code
> cleanup._

~~~
ape4
Unminified via [http://unminify.com/](http://unminify.com/)

[http://pastebin.com/Y7Q5H0AL](http://pastebin.com/Y7Q5H0AL)

~~~
laurentoget
still looks pretty unreadable to me, but then it is late on a friday.

------
kylnew
This looks pretty sweet! (On a sidenote, I'm trying to figure out whether
making the documentation look like daringfireball.net was intentional or not.)

------
specifictso
Neat, but offering only minified JS is not in the spirit of open source imho

------
mctub
[https://github.com/reelsense/markdeep](https://github.com/reelsense/markdeep)

------
emn13
The Flash Of Unstyled Content is strong with this one.

~~~
moderation
If you remove the Math section of the demo [1] that invokes 17 HTTP request
for MathJax artifacts the FOUC is still there but much quicker.

1\. [http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html](http://casual-
effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html)

------
RodericDay
I'm still kinda noob at javascript.

Can I call this on a string using a function, returning an html string, rather
do it for the whole page?

------
amai
Why do people keep reinventing LaTeX?

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codemac
ditaa?

------
ChrisLTD
I know you can't exactly copyright a color scheme, but it might be a good idea
to not so closely copy Daring Fireball.

