Markdeep - <AUTHOR> http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ <comment><USER2> Funny enough, browsing without Javascript resulted in the same plain text appearing in both windows. I was nearly ready to comment about how easy that is with a pair of <pre> tags. :)

That said, I'm OK with it degrading like that. The text file is perfectly readable, and conveys the information within quite well. I even kind of preferred it.

So, yeah. Great job, OP.

<comment><USER3> How can you tell if someone browses the web with JavaScript disabled?

Oh don't worry. They'll let you know. Any chance they get.

<comment><USER4> A vegan, a crossfitter, an atheist, a crypto nerd, and a javascript disabler walk into a bar...

<comment><USER5> Same person?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get it. Why would I do diagrams in ascii when I can use any one of dozens of good programs and export the result via DVI or PDF. I guess it must might be nice if I want to read the document on a text console, but I don't see that use case coming up nearly often enough to justify learning yet another version of markdown and commit to doing diagrams with ascii art.

<comment><USER7> Version control. If I add an ASCII art diagram to a text document, I can git diff it, and see that the ASCII art diagram was added. If my documentation is is in PDF, I can keep it in version control, but I lose a lot of the advantages that version control provides because PDF is a binary format.

<comment><USER8> But if you create the pdf using a script (e.g. latex tikz) then this is in your version control instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think org-mode can do that too (and much more I guess).

[http://home.fnal.gov/~neilsen/notebook/orgExamples/org- examp...](http://home.fnal.gov/~neilsen/notebook/orgExamples/org- examples.html#sec-5)

<comment><USER10> How popular is it? Will this ever catch on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Combine with [http://asciiflow.com/](http://asciiflow.com/) and ascii heaven comes closer ;)

<comment><USER12> Don't forget artist-mode! [http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs- artist.html](http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-artist.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> RST could do this - but I like Markdeep's simplified way (no "directives")

Now if all editors could come up with a compatible ascii graphic drawing tool that would actually be useable.

<comment><USER14> I think all editors can read in the results of an external program, which might be a better solution. For example, the par text reformatter. Vim doesn't know a thing about it, but it will feed selected text to it, and replace it with results.

So for ascii diagrams, you might have an external program that generates, at least, various kinds of boxes and connectors, then you could edit the labels from the editor. Bonus if the external ascii diagram generator would take labels associated with entities.

Maybe that's an additional feature for Markdeep, or maybe it's a specific itch for someone else to scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice setup, but its very cumbersome to write graphs in ascii, i prefer DOT if i dont care about layout too much, otherwise i use gliffy or something like that. For simple diagrams this is nice. However i think the main reason to use this is not diagrams. However then i think its better to use Markdown since most people know that.

<comment><USER16> There's ASCIIFlow for that: [http://asciiflow.com/](http://asciiflow.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author seems very proud of the automatic-rendering JS they've written, and it's kind of cute but personally I'd much rather a batch-conversion tool.

On the other hand, that ASCII-art-to-SVG conversion is golden, and I'd absolutely love to have that supported in my API docs and blog-posts.

<comment><USER18> It would probably be trivial to pre-process the text with the script if you wanted to - at the end of the day it has to just be outputting DOM elements.

I for one love that it doesn't require a preprocessing step, because it means that any text file can easily be rendered without any need to do anything else.

Fantastic job OP, I think this is really awesome. Would be perfect if this was integrated with github - I would do all my readmes with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> After 10 seconds of inspection: no, not a good idea, don't think this solves a nice problem.

Speaking as a PL & s-exp guy, I don't really have a problem writing

(bullets (item "pick up milk") (item "drop off desk"))

... but at the end of the day, I see that I can convey the same structure in a clearer way using markdown. Markdown is lovely because it's the _thinnest possible skin_ over the structure; you can immediately see what structure the syntax is attaching. (Yes, there's still some parsing nastiness around paragraphs). This thing, though, doesn't have that "brilliant solution to a simple but really important problem" feel to it. I don't see this catching on.

Of course, I said the same thing about the internet in the spring of 1993.

</comment><comment><USER20> So frustrating that both Markdown and this don't support underlines.

<comment><USER21> I don't think this is the right way to look at this. They both transform to the most sensible html given the input.

If you want to use an underline for emphasis instead of cursive, this is more of a style concern than anything else, so the appropriate place to change this would be in the stylesheet, which is perfectly possible.

If you specifically want it to output the <u> html tag, I agree that this is not as convenient.

<comment><USER22> > They both transform to the most sensible html given the input.

I'm going to have to disagree with you. Long before Markdown came along, the convention was to use asterisks for * bold *, slashes for /italics/ and underscores for _underlined_ text. And that's just for starters.

Those three examples perfectly convey the intended effect, quite unlike the Markdown versions where asterisks will somehow imply italics, but only if they're single asterisks? It's a strange thing!

<comment><USER21> The point is that bold, italics, underline are all a property of the style, but not intent. The intent is "emphasis". How emphasis is rendered is dependent on the stylesheet.

<comment><USER23> If the intent is simply "emphasis", why are there different ways of expressing it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The ASCII to graph feature reminds me of [https://github.com/knsv/mermaid](https://github.com/knsv/mermaid) .

But I like the more WYSIWYG approach (if I dare say) of Markdeep.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am thinking of using this for my personal website. It has been a while since I have had to think about licenses, and I am having trouble thinking this one through.

 _Markdeep is open source. You may use, extend, and redistribute Markdeep without charge under the terms of the BSD license: ... Markdeep includes markdown.js, so you are also bound by the MIT license (which is BSD- compatible): ... ...and the highlight.js BSD license:_

If I understand correctly that means I have to serve all three licenses in my HTML?

<comment><USER23> Presumably you don't have to serve _any_ licenses - the license should be in the Javascript file itself?

(disclaimer: I didn't check)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice, you could also do something to embed [http://yuml.me](http://yuml.me) diagrams for converting text into diagrams?

</comment><comment><USER27> Might want to make sure you spell your inspiration's name correctly (ie, not Grubber)

<comment><USER28> he also spelled github as githib, so Gruber's name might also be intentional.

<comment><USER29> Two wrongs don't make a right...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> the ability to turn txt into a diagram is intriguing

<comment><USER31> Absolutely fricking cool. Would need to learn some extra text editor tricks, however, to make it a smooth experience...

<comment><USER32> DrawIt for Vim: [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40) . I think I started using this in the previous millennium, and if not, not much later. It's awesome. Not all (former) coworkers agree with that sentiment though, to be honest.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for your suggestions, roel_v and a_e_k! Will play around with DrawIt, looks fun!

<comment><USER32> Two other tools that render images from ascii are ditaa ([http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/](http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/)) and plantuml ([http://plantuml.com/](http://plantuml.com/)). Those tools, some scripts to render and combine markdown and images, and DrawIt (+ some other vim tools like 'boxes' (not sure if that still has a web page), 'sketch.vim' and 'boxdraw') make for the least painful, versionable documentation system, for me. ('least painful' in the sense that I still need to code way too much to get it all to work, but there isn't anything ready-made and stable enough that I have been able to find the last decade).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Where exactly is the source code?

<comment><USER34> [http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/markdeep.min.js](http://casual- effects.com/markdeep/markdeep.min.js)

+

> _The current 0.01 beta release is minified-only to find bugs and get > feedback, but a full source version is coming soon after some more code > cleanup._

<comment><USER35> Unminified via [http://unminify.com/](http://unminify.com/)

[http://pastebin.com/Y7Q5H0AL](http://pastebin.com/Y7Q5H0AL)

<comment><USER36> still looks pretty unreadable to me, but then it is late on a friday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks pretty sweet! (On a sidenote, I'm trying to figure out whether making the documentation look like daringfireball.net was intentional or not.)

</comment><comment><USER38> Neat, but offering only minified JS is not in the spirit of open source imho

</comment><comment><USER39> [https://github.com/reelsense/markdeep](https://github.com/reelsense/markdeep)

</comment><comment><USER40> The Flash Of Unstyled Content is strong with this one.

<comment><USER41> If you remove the Math section of the demo [1] that invokes 17 HTTP request for MathJax artifacts the FOUC is still there but much quicker.

1\. [http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html](http://casual- effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm still kinda noob at javascript.

Can I call this on a string using a function, returning an html string, rather do it for the whole page?

</comment><comment><USER43> Why do people keep reinventing LaTeX?

</comment><comment><USER44> ditaa?

</comment><comment><USER45> I know you can't exactly copyright a color scheme, but it might be a good idea to not so closely copy Daring Fireball.</comment>


Show HN: Twibble.io – A Better Solution to Feed Content to Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://twibble.io/?s=hk

<comment><USER2> Love the design :)</comment>


Big Australian banks stun Bitcoin companies by closing their accounts - <AUTHOR> http://www.afr.com/technology/big-banks-cut-off-accounts-of-bitcoin-companies-in-battle-for-the-future-of-payments-20150921-gjr7hu <comment><USER2> Shutting down their competitors.</comment>