IPC144 VS prism-react-renderer

Reviewing two PRs from a classmate is one of the duties for this project. The PRs, as well as my reviews, are available here and here. Both of the PRs I reviewed were really well-written and detailed, with very few mistakes. It was interesting to observe how different people approached certain changes, such as adding a svg file.

For this assignment we had to contribute to a Seneca repository. I chose the IPC144 repo.

Issue: https://github.com/Seneca-ICTOER/IPC144/issues/64 I worked on the standardized front matter across all markdown pages. This open-source project is the C language course notes of my major program.

And the reason why the web-only artifacts is still appear on the PDF page is because the --excludeSelectors option is not implemented enough. I have to add .clean-btn to the --excludeSelectors, the purpose of this is not to include the "On the page" artifact in side the PDF page. This is the final source code I have implement for this improvement and my pull request

I think I was able to do a good job meeting my goals I gave myself in my planning phase of this release. I was able to finish the issues well on schedule while balancing my other courses like I hoped and I was able to properly audit and fix both issues #122 and #123 without needing too many changes after review. What I learned from those two issues is the importance to read and checkout other issues/pull requests, especially for smaller repos. As I was told in the review for both my issues, I learned that the project recently made changes with how we would format the frontmatter. In PR #142 we no longer use the slug for pages due to inconsistency with links and we also need to include a description to follow the standardized Frontmatter as updated in PR #143.

The first issue I was working on IPC144 Course Note is about improving the usability of the PDF file generated from the website. All contents are generated inside the PDF, however, we want to get this better since some of the pictures are not showing properly, and also the web-only artifacts are still on the PDF, which we do not want it when we use the "PDF" version. convert-to-pdf.sh file would be modified a bit to accomplish this.

Issue #113

PR

As for this pull request, the code review went much more smoothly, with me having to only make minor changes to ensure that it would not cause any errors when built.

2. #issue-107

Both frameworks also support code blocks with syntax highlighting. Docusaurus uses prism-react-renderer for theming, while Starlight uses an Astro package called expressive-code to control customizations.

In my previous blog post on Code Reading, I read the codebase of Docusaurus to research how the project implements Syntax Highlighting for fenced code blocks. My research taught me that Docusaurus actually uses Prism-React-Renderer, a third-party library, to provide Syntax Highlighting. This knowledge was useful because I wanted to add syntax highlighting to ctil, my Markdown-to-HTML converter, but didn't want to implement the feature from scratch. Although I can't use Prism React Renderer in my own project, researching Docusaurus gave me the idea to find a Open Source library I could use.

For non-live codeBlock, you may want to render it by prism-react-renderer which is working also under the LiveEditor. I'm not sure what is the best way to share the style and theme between them but do so anyhow.

If you already haven’t integrated MDX into your project (you should because MDX is awesome), here’s the official guide on Gatsby's documentation to add it to your project. However, if you are already using Markdown Remark in your project, consider Migrating to MDX. In this post, we will integrate PrismJS syntax highlighting with MDX using prism-react-renderer. Also, we are going to add line numbers to code blocks. This is what we are aiming for:

Syntax Highlighting - Nextra comes with in-built syntax highlighting. However, when I created my site the syntax highlighting feature doesn’t seem to be working. So, I ended up creating my own syntax-highlighting component with prism-react-renderer.

If you have a Nextjs blog (or any React Framework blog) and want to create beautiful code blocks out of your MDX posts, then this post will show you how to do that using prism-react-renderer.

To fix it, I just went to this repo, specifically to prism-react-renderer/themes/ and checked the available themes I could use, and found out that the Visual Studio themes looked the best for my purpose.

From memory you need to target the `pre` block so you can apply the styles/theme to them. I uses prism-react-renderer.

Integrating syntax highlighting in Gatsby is solvable with solutions like gatsby-remark-prismjs or prism-react-renderer. When creating the code block in Markdown you specify the desired language (e.g. js or css) after the opening three backticks. It's a nice touch to display the specified language also in the code block itself, like I do it on my blog here:

In this very short quick tip you'll learn how to set up code blocks in MDX and Gatsby that support line numbers and code highlighting using the code renderer prism-react-renderer. A preview can be found on CodeSandbox.