remark VS marked

Both Remark and Rehype are frameworks to transform documents by first transforming them to abstract syntax trees (AST) and then applying pluggable functions to the AST before converting it to the target format.

remarkjs/remark: markdown processor powered by plugins part of the @unifiedjs collective

I also didn't try this tool but it's called RemarkJS which is named too similar to revealjs.

remark. Primarily, this is a linter for Markdown. Additionally, thanks to its numerous plugins, it allows us to perform additional checks for grammatical mistakes within the content itself. Before using this linter, our content was not scrutinized to this extent.

Rehype and Remark are plugins used to transform and manipulate the HTML and Markdown content of a website, helping to enhance its functionality and appearance.

I usually combine remark-parse, remark-rehype and rehype-react to transform markdown into react components. The configuration of the processor is like:

Astro content collection are as simple as a folder containing a bunch of Markdown (or Markdoc or MDX) files if that's the only thing you need, but they can also do relationship matching between different collections, frontmatter validation using zod and you can also customize how the markdown is parsed and translated to html using rehype and remark and their plugin ecosystem.

On my personal blog I have few external links in my posts. I wanted to keep people on my website by applying target="_blank" on external (those what don't reference to my site) links. This is a common and good practice too. I write my content in Markdown, so I decided to write a remark plugin. It is simple to implement, just few lines of code.

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

That's all to render the post as HTML, there are lots of things you can do to customize the results, you can check the remark plugins and rehype plugins to pass as props to and you can also take a look at some other bloggers if you're looking for different styles for example Lee Robinson's or if you liked mine.

The first step is to install marked. This is a markedown parser that will convert our markdown content into HTML. Run the command below to install marked.

I'm using @std/front-matter package along with marked as my blog runs on Deno, but FM would work with anything that has markdown files in folders.

To tackle this, I created an issue detailing my planned approach. I intended to use Marked to conditionally render certain markdown elements into HTML. After diving deep into Marked's documentation, I discovered this was indeed possible - you can simply disable the elements you don't want to render into HTML!

Now that I knew what I knew, it was time to start. Before I even began to consider how to solve this, I knew how these large projects feel about dependencies, so I went to the package.json file to check and see if there were things that I could work with. And what do you know? highlight.js was already included! What I immediately thought of was perhaps using the marked parser in addition to highlight.js to create and use my code blocks. But after quite a lot of time attempting this, I realized that hand-rolling this solution would not only take a lot of time but would also require a lot of code.

We'll start by initializing a Node project inside a chosen folder (nodejs-blog for me) with and installing a couple of dependencies that I feel like will make our lives easier, like Express, EJS, Marked, the good ol' body-parser and gray-matter.

Blog posts, as you've already noticed, are markdown files with attributes which are converted to static HTML on build using Marked and Front Matter.

The Marked package, with which we will display the markdown format.

Next, install gray-matter to extract metadata from the front matter of markdown files, and marked to convert the markdown files to HTML:

📑 Marked Markdown parser. Use it to create your own markdown editor.

Vrite SDK provides a few built-in input and output transformers. These are functions, with standardized signatures to process the content from and into Vrite. In this case, gfmInputTransformer is essentially a GitHub Flavored Markdown parser, using Marked.js under the hood.