Live data from Hacker News

MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

rust-lang.github.io

51–60 of 123 posts

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#53
post #16

I recently started exploring, and slowly migrating, to .mdx over .md for content. So far it’s been a breath of fresh air tbh. My biggest problem of markdown was the specific flavor I happen to be using and the type of cliffs I’d run into, then how to extend them. I’m extremely satisfied with 80-90% of the standard Gitbook markdown flavor. Then every now and then I really wanna make a complicated table, or a code bloc…

> My biggest problem of markdown was the specific flavor I happen to be using and the type of cliffs I’d run into, then how to extend them. First time I heard of .mdx and looked up the site [0]. I am insufficiently in the loop of frontend standardization. Now it would be great to get rid of flavors and have one universal approach. In the Docs I read: > MDX is not coupled to React. You can also use it with Preact, Vue…

JSX is evidence that new generation of programmers are not taught engineering. There are very valid reasons why we went for encapsulation and separation of concerns. JSX throws the baby with the bath water and goes back to PHP5 sites with markup and code interspersed. Even authors of JSX cannot make it work reliably in their flagship product. MDX couples JSX with markdown.

I cannot see how this yields maintainable source. Sure, spaghetti code is nice for quick, one off scripts, but if you'd volunteer for helpdesk shift to be yelled at rather than fix a bug in 5k SLOC collection of Windows Batch scripts, then maybe you should reconsider mdx.

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#54

> It is ideal for creating product or API documentation, tutorials, course materials or anything that requires a clean, easily navigable and customizable presentation. Markdown is really crap for any of that. Any real writer knows that the best way to communicate an idea quickly and effectively is to present it the right way. Markdown does not have good presentation. It was not designed for good presentation. It was…

I disagree. All it takes is a CSS file, some semantic HTML in the right places and some inline Mermaid diagrams and you have a pretty decent document. I routinely write one-pagers, memos and architecture summaries in Markdown and generate PDFs with weasyprint (or even just iOS’s print to PDF feature), and all I use is a print CSS file and whatever JS is required to render the diagrams.

I would love to not use a browser engine at all (and moderately detest Mermaid because it cannot work fully in-memory without instantiating one), but it works.

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#55
post #44

IIRC, this platform uses CDN-hosted libraries rather than bundling/vendoring. As a result, users are exposed to not just outages of the CDNs but also the data collected by these servers. That’s a bummer. …but it’s not the only bummer. The usage of Highlight.js + MathJax on the front-end is horribly wasteful. Why? It demands all clients parse & render the syntax/LaTeX which is not only taxing on CPUs and batteries, bu…

Looks like MathJax is hosted on a CDN. Everything else, from css to other js files, is hosted alongside the HTML files.

Seems a bit strange. I wonder why they chose to use a CDN for that one js file.

Perhaps because MathJax support is optional? https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/format/mathjax.html

Even though the MathJax js file will in turn probably load more things hosted on the CDN. I don’t understand why they are not putting all of the MathJax files alongside the generated HTML files. So that one does not have to rely on any CDN.

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#56

Md book is great! We created a Nim version to support content written with nimib (a framework to publish html pages with Nim code and its results) and it has been very useful! https://pietroppeter.github.io/nimibook/index.html As people are sharing other SSG (I think material for MkDocs is the absolute best for documentation sites), let me share a relatively unknown one that I find very interesting: https://github.co…

It’s also surprisingly nice for things other than documentation, such as personal notes or journals. Or even novels:

https://mdpub.github.io/cheela/

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#57
post #15

I have been using Mdbook for a while and its been great, I maintain a simple knowledge base for myself https://til-mraza007.vercel.app/ I love how simple it is

You might have to update the Bluetooth article; you do not stop bluetooth with 'enable' ;-)

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#59

I love MdBook. It's also dirt simple to customize it with plugins or rendering backends: * https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-graphviz * https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-confluence

You might be interested in https://kroki.io and https://github.com/JoelCourtney/mdbook-kroki-preprocessor.

Re: MdBook – A command line tool to create books with Markdown

#60
post #44

IIRC, this platform uses CDN-hosted libraries rather than bundling/vendoring. As a result, users are exposed to not just outages of the CDNs but also the data collected by these servers. That’s a bummer. …but it’s not the only bummer. The usage of Highlight.js + MathJax on the front-end is horribly wasteful. Why? It demands all clients parse & render the syntax/LaTeX which is not only taxing on CPUs and batteries, bu…

Looks like MathJax is hosted on a CDN. Everything else, from css to other js files, is hosted alongside the HTML files. Seems a bit strange. I wonder why they chose to use a CDN for that one js file. Perhaps because MathJax support is optional? https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/format/mathjax.html Even though the MathJax js file will in turn probably load more things hosted on the CDN. I don’t understand why they ar…

Now that I’m at my laptop I can see that you are correct on most things at least now being vendored­–though it took me a while to find it since the scripts in the like it’s last decade instead of in the with async or defer attributes.
Post reply on HN