Tables in Markdown editor

[elnull]

Is it possible to add tables detection to editor's parser and output them with monospace font?

[pbek]

Which table syntax are we talking of?

[elnull]

https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet#tables

[pbek]

Hm, maybe if a line starts and ends with an | we could make it a code block. What do you think, would that be enough?

[elnull]

It would be enough if your parser doesn't support multiline. I think the better test for tables would be search for sequential lines with same count of |.

[pbek]

The parser is generated from a lexer of PEG Markdown Highlight.
The Lexer looks like this:
https://github.com/pbek/qmarkdowntextedit/blob/develop/lib/peg-markdown-highlight/pmh_grammar.leg

If you can come up with a lexer statement that works, I will integrate it 😸

[DivineDominion]

When you use PEG Markdown: there's PEG MultiMarkdown which includes table syntax already.

[pbek]

@DivineDominion is there a Qt implementation for it?

[Maboroshy]

I was converting some old tables to markdown and it has not been easy. I had to add code tags to edit table in monospace. Then delete code tags for rendering. And all that many times.

I think that highlighter should put to monospace anything between |. Like |I'm a table|. Yes that doesn't cover no outside borders style (it makes it unusable really) but at least half is covered.

Another issue is that rendered tables have no grid lines. I find it hard to read wide tables without a grid. That looks like a css thing, haven't worked out that yet.

[pbek]

It will be easier when QOwnNotes would use a fully fledged browser component for previewing (which doesn't work right now because it would break Debian 8.0 support). But the disadvantage would be the increased ram consumption...

[Maboroshy]

I'm not really looking forward to having fully fledged browser in the app. It's not the RAM that makes me unsure that it's the good path but the responsiveness of the app. All "browser inside" apps I saw lacked it. Like that Typora thing some user mentioned - browser and fancy JS stuff allows many smart UI features, but it's loading too slow for a minimalistic editor and scrolling is lagging for half a second with a big document. No feature will make me use plain text editor that has scrolling lagging.

[pbek]

16.11.15

• a new markdown parser and highlighter was now implemented from
  scratch to allow a higher parsing speed and more flexibility in the future
  • text will now be instantly highlighted, there is no
    highlighting-interval setting any more
  • now you also can change the styling in the settings or
    enable/disable the highlighting without re-starting the application
  • please report issues with the new highlighter if you find any
• markdown tables are now supported by the new markdown highlighter
  • the mono-space code font is used for it
  • you can change the highlighting color and other styles in the settings

feedback is welcome, @elnull, @DivineDominion, @Maboroshy, @jd666

[Maboroshy]

First impressions:

1. All good and fast.
2. Table highlighting works correctly, also with "no outside border style". I had one misfire on some link having a title with sevral |. I understand that | is rare in normal text, but having kind of priority for link highlighting over table highlighting would be good.
3. Highlighter doesn't parse ![](file://) as an image, it wants at least a space in the title. Yet it's a valid renderable markdown, and I have plenty of those. I wanted to make a pull request, but looks like markdown syntax definitions are gone out of the app to upstream now.

[Maboroshy]

Also # I'm a header [link](url) highlighted as a simple header now. Previously it was highlighted correctly with a specific highlighting for a link inside.

[Maboroshy]

Links without syntax like http://url are not highlighted. I'm not sure but I remember they were highlighted before and even had an entry in colour scheme editor. I may be wrong though.

[pbek]

Thank you for your feedback, @Maboroshy! I'll see what I can do.

[pbek]

@Maboroshy

but looks like markdown syntax definitions are gone out of the app to upstream now

Actually it even went two steps down-steam :)
The highlighting was always done in https://github.com/pbek/qmarkdowntextedit.
But before the parsing in qmarkdowntextedit used a 3rd party library that used a 4th party library.

I fixed now all of it and more in 16.11.16.

[pbek]

16.11.16

• markdown syntax highlighting improvements
  • better multi-line html comment detection
  • image links like ![](file://) work now
  • it's now possible to have links and italic/bold formatting in a headline
  • urls without any other markup are now highlighted too
    • they can now also be opened with Ctrl + Click
  • formatting bold and italic with __bold__ and _italic_ now also works
  • fixed a wrongly detected table in a link
• you can now insert a markdown table with the new shortcut Alt + ⇧ + T
  • a markdown table wizard will be opened to create an empty table to work with

[pbek]

There now is a new release, could you please test it and report if the new features work for you?

[pbek]

@Maboroshy, sourceforge has problems, you might need to wait for your AUR release... :/

[Maboroshy]

The highlighting was always done in https://github.com/pbek/qmarkdowntextedit.

My bad. For some reason I thought that qmarkdowntextedit was some Qt thing.

After the last fix finding new bugs is a challenge. I accept it though. 😎

[pbek]

My bad. For some reason I thought that qmarkdowntextedit was some Qt thing.

nah, I created it for QOwnNotes and made it a library for others to use...

After the last fix finding new bugs is a challenge. I accept it though. 😎

You always do. ;)

[Maboroshy]

Ok then, here we go.

1. Images highlighted in a weird way. I see ! or ![] part highlighted as image and [title](url) part highlighted as a link. Two colour code is fancy though.
2. Bolds and italics are highlighted inside table monospace making monospace not that "mono". And I don't remember it in previous version.

[
ti
tle](
url
)

is not highlighted as a link, same for image. Yet it's valid and does render.

I'm still to learn QRegularExpression but some ?s in regexps, like in !\\[.*?\\]\\(.+?\\), make me... uneasy.

[pbek]

Thank you for testing, I will take a look at 1) and 2). I will not take care of 3), that would be much too bothersome with QSyntaxHighlighter.
The ? in this case is for non-greedy matching.

[pbek]

16.11.18

• fixed a highlighting issue with images and tables

[pbek]

16.11.18

• fixed highlighting issues with images and tables
• dramatically reduced the loading time of large notes
  • the navigation tree in the navigation panel was rebuilt too often
    with the new highlighter

There now is a new release, could you please test it and report if the new features work for you?

[Maboroshy]

Looks like everything working now, except 3 of course. I tuned Bash-note to correct multiline links from converted web pages anyway. Some legacy stuff left.

[pbek]

Great, thank you!

[pbek]

16.12.0

• you can now import csv files with the Insert table dialog
  • you'll get a preview of the content of your csv file
  • you can choose your separator, text-delimiter and whether the
    first line is the table heading
• more highlighting fixes
  • fixed an issue with other highlighting inside an inline code block
  • table highlighting support for tables, that don't start with a |
    was dropped, that's far to messy to deal with

[pbek]

There now is a new release, could you please test it and report if the new features work for you?