devportal VS commonmark-spec

Hello folks, I am running a tech writing team (along with product management). I am not expert in documentation platforms. Today we have a challenging custom-built documentation platform based on Sphinx and a bunch of cobbled together technologies aiven/devportal: Resources for users of the projects on the Aiven platform (github.com) . Our documentation is in .rst markup language due to the Python focus.

Humble brag that the last one in the list (Aiven 🦀) won 2022 DevPortal Awards in the category Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms. If I added a list of great docs websites but didn't include the OG, it would be a crime. Check out one of THE BEST documentation out there - Stripe Docs, built using Markdoc.

You can find a list of Aiven's cloud providers on [Developer.aiven.io], which is also the portal where we host the developer documentation. To quickly retrieve a list of currently-available cloud providers, my colleague Lorna Mitchell wrote a Python script that pulls our cloud listing from the Aiven API and generates documentation, which is really cool!

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.