GitHub Markdown compatibility

[eecs441staff]

Primer-spec doesn’t recognize ‘\’ as line-break marker, as GitHub Markdown does, requiring use of double spaces instead.

[seshrs]

Thanks for reporting @eecs441staff! I dug a bit deeper, and I have some good news, some bad news and a potential alternative.

Good news: It's very easy to enable GitHub Flavored MarkDown (GFM) for your site! Simply add a markdown: GFM option to your _config.yml so that it looks something like this:

remote_theme: eecs485staff/primer-spec
plugins:
    - jekyll-remote-theme

# The default MarkDown processor for Jekyll is actually 'kramdown'. Change to GFM if you prefer.
markdown: GFM

Bad news: If you make the change above, you will not be able to preview your site locally. It looks like Jekyll 3.8 has some bugs with the GFM parser dependency. It's fixed in Jekyll 4, but GitHub Pages hasn't upgraded their version of Jekyll yet. 😢

---

Alternative: I know this isn't a great alternative, but another way to force a line-break is to add two spaces at the end of the line. For example:

This is on line 1
and this is a continuation of that line. But if you add two spaces -->  
then this line gets broken!

Edit: Oops, looks like you knew this already.

---

I will update the Advanced Usage docs to explain how to use GFM on a Primer Spec site.

[eecs441staff]

@seshrs the following:

remote_theme: eecs485staff/primer-spec
plugins:
    - jekyll-remote-theme
markdown: GFM

did it for me: \ now works as line-break when viewed on GitHub Pages.

Both Chrome and Safari immediately download my .md files, so I never had local preview anyway. Thanks!