Markdown Preview

Hello,

I was wondering it seemed liked a good idea to preview readme or readme.md files in a folder, most likely a git repo fully formatted in the preview window, like in a github repo. The general preview work to see the plain text but I would like to see the properly formatted thing when certain conditions are met. After some quick googling I can't find windows 8 preview tool for markdown so i don't know if it could even be done natively, but i wanted to ask just incase. I would love this feature.

I don't know of any existing viewer for Markdown files.

A viewer plugin could be written using the SDK, and maybe the existing NFO plugin as a starting point, by someone with some programming knowledge who wanted to do it.

Thanks for the reply.

I use this markdownpad.com/ for markdown on Windows, amazing program.

What i was wondering is if it seemed like the kind of thing the Opus Dev's would bake into the app itself. Markdown + readme files seem like they have made their dent and it would be really nice to be able to jump into a git repo and see the fully formatted readme without requiring a third party app. I guess it could be thought of like supporting bbcode or similar but there are a lot of markdown formatted readme files out there in comparison.

I was just something i thought worth trying my luck asking for.

It's not something we're planning to do at the moment. I think this is the first time it has been mentioned or requested by anyone. But the plugin API exists to let other people do the same thing, so it doesn't have to be us that does it.

BTW, it may (depending on how the code is structured) be fairly straightforward for someone who already has markdown rendering code to turn it into a Preview Handler which would work in Explorer, Outlook and Directory Opus, and thus be useful to lots of people. So it might be worth suggesting to e.g. the authors of MarkdownPad that they wrap their existing code for the right-hand preview panel in their app into a preview handler.

Adapting existing code into a preview handler is usually fairly trivial, and much easier than writing the parsing and rendering code itself.

I emailed them, I really think it worth a shot. Specifically because if their preview could be integrated into windows and take advantage of the custom stylesheets and css tweaking features it would be epic.

Thanks.

I never got a reply but i will try again on their twitter.

developer.github.com/v3/markdow ... n-document

I bump this because it seems the better apps use github to render the markdown. This is essentially all that needs to be done or to have the option to render .md files or similar this way.

So where would it start (documentation for creating such a thing)? to have a document preview rendered by github then display the result in the preview?

Github is a source control system and online service. I don't know anything about using it to render text, sorry.

Reading the linked page, you could have a viewer which hosts Internet Explorer and then posts the data to be rendered to the Github service and displays the result. (All of which is doable if you know C++ and Windows programming.) It would only work when online and wouldn't be as fast as a local renderer would be, but should work in theory.

Leo can this be a supported feature, I have folders for each client/vendor and I generally just put README.txt docs in each folder

README.txt documents are pretty lackluster when it comes to formatting

It would be nice to have native support for README.md docs

Try this:

I have no idea how to install that, couldn't find any compiled binary files or msi or exe files?

Is there any other similar repos to that one?

Install/download instructions are on the page:

However, I tried it and still couldn't get it to work in Explorer or Opus. It only seems to work properly in the SharpShell test application (the same thing it says to use to install it), which is no use.

That's all I know about it. You could try asking the author.

Another Markdown preview handler, this time by Microsoft: