Allow users to configure markdown rendering

[jessleenyc]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Markdown can be handled in a few ways and some people will have preferences for certain things. Makes sense to let people choose how they want their markdown handled.

Describe the solution you'd like
To start, let's add the option for our markdown parser to ignore certain line-breaks. See #575 for more info. This is a setting users should be able to toggle through their settings page.

[abraham]

I would recommend against customization of markdown. Having a number of options will add a lot of code paths in an area that is already difficult to test. I would suggest using a standardized markdown implementation that aligns with CommonMark plus the liquid tags. Maybe offering an escape hatch were authors can disable markdown and switch to HTML for advanced features.

[dguo]

CommonMark specifies how both hard line breaks and soft line breaks should be treated. The problem in #575 is that dev.to's parser seems to generate hard line breaks (<br>) no matter what.

Though CommonMark does say: "A renderer may also provide an option to render soft line breaks as hard line breaks."

[bwl21]

Note that Github has a different behaviour with respect to line breaks for Issues and other places. I find this pretty strange and annoying.

see: https://github.community/t5/How-to-use-Git-and-GitHub/Why-does-markdown-in-issues-respect-line-breaks/m-p/18637

[tmr232]

Any update on this?
I just encountered it today posting an article and having to remove breaks from all my paragraphs.

[arian]

A workaround for this is to use prettier with the --prose-wrap option set to never:

prettier post.md --prose-wrap never

That way you don't need to manually remove the newlines, and can write the post as you want.

[cmgorton]

I am going to leave #12061 open and close this issue since they are similar but this one has been around for awhile with no traction. I think we should collect and highlight all of the markdown issues we have in the repo that are ready for dev. I am adding #12061 to a list to highlight.