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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Missing features in Markdown:
I'm not saying not to use md (vs. asciidoc/tor, restex or orgmode) but to add the features please.
Description lists?
Richtext? Like this or this ?
SVG handling? I've never seen a manpage with SVGs nor have I seen a manpage with images, much less image captions.
That's not rich text. Rich text is when a format is applied without structural reason.
You could have a markdown interpreter that displayed
**this***this*or_this_using any arbitrary format. You could change the color, weight, border, drop shadow, opacity, mouse over effects, font face... Any attribute.Lemmy has conventions but all
*really means is emphasis.No, like the mentioned
<u>underline</u>(this is how you write it in ~~markdown~~ html).This is from wanting to use markdown for more than tech. documentation, like saving some simple websites.
If you want to save a website use html
It's only formatted text anyway, so why would i want to save it in a hard-to-read format with scripts and inline style noise and with frames and headers and footers in the way even if rendered? I care for the info only, it should look how i as the reader want it to look.
Typora has a convenient convert-on-paste feature. Sadly, there's no such tool for asciidoctor and pandoc does noisy convert (lots of artifacts).
I used to use typora; it does have a really nice convert web->markdown. I think that it is done by some javascript or something because the other tools that have comparable quality I can think of off the top of my head are obsidian, joplin clipper and a couple of firefox extensions. I agree that in my experience pandoc and a couple other cli tools didn't produce such nice results.
I also think in all those cases the browser is doing some of the work because it renders the page, discards a lot of irrelevant stuff, then you copy/convert just a selection portion of what's visible. Whereas if you, for example, grab a raw html page through curl and send it to pandoc, none of that is done. You probably aren't using Select All when you copy a page to typora, but pandoc would be faced with the entire page. I don't know if there is a way to access the Reader View from the terminal but it would go a distance to cleaning up your pandoc conversion if you could start from there (for those sites on which it's available).
I tried and failed to do the same thing but it's not markdown's fault. No matter how many bells and whistles markdown would get, the issue is in the conversion from html part.
True, but my points above are things i found lacking in comparison to asciidoctor, while there the desktop tooling is lacking (yes there's asciidoc.js).
Someone can correct this but iirc some implementations of markdown have image options like this:
Others put the size in
{ }after the main image item.Rich text is contrary to the structural focus of markdown. Why should it be added?
Guess we have a semantics problem here. I understand under "rich text" text with formatting, not the long since dead file format. Markup is the language used to add richness to the plain text, no?
Sorry I was trying to follow your meaning, because the example of absent rich text you gave was underlines. There is already basic text formatting support such as strong, emphasis, headings and links.
You could style any, all or none of those to have underlining. Whatever chosen rendering, they all have meaning independent from the applied style. What you are asking for is to have something that is purely a display style without any structural value. This is not coming to markdown any time soon. Hardly anyone uses underline as its own thing in html anymore, for good reasons.
Maybe this article will help to further explain.
Native SVG handling would be completely out of scope. The point of markdown is that it is supposed to be understandable in its plain text format. SVG is incompatible with that. The closest thing would be like mermaid charts but I think it's quite a stretch even then.
I think you should just use HTML, it has a much larger array of tools that would suit your needs. Markdown is purposely constrained because it enables much more portability.