What I miss in Markdown (and Hugo)

stereobooster - Jan 24 '21 - - Dev Community

I like Markdown for its simplicity. Simplicity comes with limitations. There are some features that I miss in Markdown or it is possible to extend Markdown to support these cases, but there is no support from the Hugo side (static site generator I use).

Note: I can’t use JS to do additional rendering on the client-side, because:

  • I cross-post my articles, which means that articles should contain only HTML and images (JS will not work on 3-rd party website)
  • I care about the speed of my website and each JS script is a penalty for performance

Features

Diagrams

I would like to create diagrams with-in markdown. Something like this:

``mermaid
graph TD;
A-->B;
A-->C;
B-->D;
C-->D;
``
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Which would render:

Diagrams can be described, for example, with: flowchart.js, js-sequence-diagrams, mermaid, PlantUML, WaveDrom, Viz.js, vega, ditaa, etc.

Support :

  • Markdown: Yes
  • Hugo: No
  • Editor preview: Yes

My workaround: use JS script which detects code-blocks with diagrams, renders them, and replaces code-blocks with the rendered images.

Euler diagrams

See examples here:

Support :

  • Markdown: Yes
  • Hugo: No
  • Editor preview: No

XKCD-style

I’d like to use XKCD-style for diagrams that are meant to illustrate something but are not based on scientific data.

For example, xkcd #1064:

Support :

  • Markdown: Yes
  • Hugo: No
  • Editor preview: doesn’t matter

Math notation

I don’t need anything fancy - some Greek letters, superscript, and subscript. Most of the time copy-paste Unicode characters, for example: Σ¹. But there are some edge cases, for example, there is no superscript variation for the asterisk (*).

It would be nice to use AsciiMath inside Markdown, like this:

Inline:

$Sigma^**$
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Which would render: Σ*

Block:

$$
sum_(i=1)^n i^3=((n(n+1))/2)^2
$$
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Which would render:

Support :

  • Markdown: Possible to extend
  • Hugo: No
  • Editor preview: yes 1, 2

2-column layout

Sometimes I need to show two images side-by-side, so that reader can compare them easily. I can use a table for this, but it looks ugly (a table has a header and borders). Plus tables don’t work for code-blocks.

Support :

  • Markdown: No

Side notes

It would be nice to support side notes, like in Tufte layout. Theoretically, it is possible to reuse footnotes:

Here's a simple footnote,[^1] and here's a longer one.[^bignote]
Indent paragraphs to include them in the footnote.
`{ my code }`
Add as many paragraphs as you like.
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Support :

  • Markdown: Yes?
  • Hugo: No
  • Editor preview: No

Other ideas

Collspan and rowspan for tables, superscript (30^th^), subscript (H~2~O).

Alternatives

Hugo

I’m considering 11ty. Also need to check pandoc.

Markdown

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