commonmark-spec VS djot

Edit: this is because GitHub uses cmark-gfm, which is a fork of cmark, which implements the CommonMark variant of markdown. Looks like CommonMark still doesn't support definition lists. :(

BookStack dev here. There's no specific "import" option but you can use the Markdown editor in BookStack and paste in your Markdown content there. The API is essentially just an endpoint to accept the same kind of data, for of course you could automate against the API for batch import. One thing to keep in mind is that BookStack markdown support is fairly tightly scoped to (commonmark + tables + tasklists), although HTML within MD is supported.

>A single canonical reference

https://commonmark.org/

Typically with major new releases of software, when the number left of the dot (e.g. 2.0) increases, it’s shipped as a separate product. Not always, but generally. The Bear folks can speak for themselves but IIRC a lot of the code was refactored / rewritten to support, for example, CommonMark. So, under the hood, it’s literally brand new in some respects.

I use Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) for a lot of things, including my RPG stuff, and there are options for exporting things as PDFs. It’s great for getting organized and doing research, but I would use other tools for long-form writing and layout. What I like about Obsidian though is that everything is done in Markdown (https://commonmark.org) and I can use Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) to transform the source to whatever I need. The caveat is that Obsidian uses a flavor of Markdown with some non-standard extensions, so a pure Markdown editor like Typora (https://typora.io) might be a better choice depending on your needs.

yes, this is the "inventor" of markdown and those rules will always work. Hugo uses something called "Commonmark" which is developed on top of the original markdown. But the original rules will always work too.

Reddit and many other sites support Markdown as an easy way to add emphasis, links, headings, etc. Markdown does not contain any keywords, as it is intended to be language-independent. However, Markdown syntax makes heavy use of square brackets [] and other characters that are difficult to type with an Ukrainian keyboard layout, e.g., the backtick `.

Check out commonmark, that is the Markdown standard supported by numerous converters including pandoc.

And if this is an exercise into that you can use a Markdown spec like CommonMark which is the spec Reddit and a variety of other sites use.

I know this doesn't solve your problem directly, but I recommend people to try out Djot[0], a markup language from the author of CommonMark.

Djot has a single well-defined spec, and most of the basic formatting has the same syntax as (a) Markdown, so switching is pretty painless. It has as a main goal to be legible and visually aesthetic as-is, just like Markdown.

What Djot adds is its _predictability_. Nested formatting, precedence order, line breaks behavior, nested blocks, mixed inline and block formatting, custom attributes are all laid out precisely in the spec in a thought-out manner. Till this day I still can't remember how to put line break within a list item in Markdown (and I'm sure there're more than one way).

[0]: https://djot.net/

Worth noting that the author has also created a markup language, djot.

https://github.com/jgm/djot

Every time I see people doing something with Markdown, I wish they just replace it with support for Djot[0] instead. It is a Markdown alternative by the creator of Pandoc and CommonMark that fixes all of the most egregious mistakes, while being legible and visually pleasant as-is. It is also syntactically similar to Markdown, which should ease adoption.

[0] https://github.com/jgm/djot

Are you using markdown? It might make sense to look at 'djot' as well: https://djot.net/; it's a new 'light' markup language conceived as a successor to commonmark; development is led by none other than John McFarlane (author of pandoc, & also led commonmark standardization) Djot makes it really easy to attach arbitrary attributes to block elements as well as inline elements; and the parser records source positions in the output -- all of which makes it really convenient keeping track of elements changing position or value.

I have a simple script that sends a djot buffer (https://github.com/jgm/djot) to the parser, if there's a change, on the CursorHold event.

Since you mentioned you were considering moving to CommonMark, have you had time to look into Djot (also by jpm)? Djot is meant to be easier to parse, and I'm planning to write a tree-sitter grammar for it.

Another recent development here is https://djot.net/ (by the pandoc author). It indeed thoroughly solves both: