The ever expanding Markdown app

📰 News
1

Originally published at: The ever expanding Markdown app - Nextcloud

Some of you might be familiar with the Nextcloud Markdown Editor. It has been improving steadily over the last months, encompassing a wide variety of capabilities beyond simple Markdown.

Markdown?

Wikipedia explains Markdown like this:
Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. It is designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats using a tool by the same name.
In less technical terms, it is simply some rules around how you write text. For example, you make a list like this: * first item * second item * third item

If that seems obvious to you, well, that’s exactly the point! Not everything in Markdown can be THAT obvious, but it isn’t complicated. You make something bold like this text, a link works like this link text and so on. You can also easily keep track of tasks with check lists for example.

The BEST notes!

This is perfect for note taking, among other things and can be integrated with other tools. The excellent QOwnNotes note taking app is a great solution for the desktop, letting you edit notes on your desktop and access them on mobile, syncing them to Nextcloud. The Nextcloud Notes app also stores notes on your Nextcloud, in the Notes folder, making it easy to edit them online either in the app, using QOwnNotes or by other tools!

Features

Besides rich markdown text, the Markdown app supports images and even videos embedded.

But there is a lot more:

LaTeX support

If you're a scientist or for other reasons working with formulas, you'll love this!

Syntax highlighting

Developers and system administrators will appreciate the syntax highlighting support!

Graph support

If you're in need of a quick graph, that, too is possible!

Time to get it?

You can install the Markdown app very easily from the app store, find it under the Office & text section in our store. Like it? Leave a rating in our app store!
7 Likes
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Thanks for this post! I learned a lot from that and tried graphs for the first time.

Unfortunately I discovered an issue.
I used your example for the graph

graph TD;
    A-->B;
    A-->C;
    C-->D;
    B-->D;

and it breaks or at least manipulates the CSS of Nextcloud, as soon as the details for the markdown file are opened - so as soon as the preview of the files is displayed in the details. Other graphs or other mark down formats didn’t cause that issue. I only saw that for this graph.

1 Like
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Unfortunately event the most simplest thing like relative links so NOT work. Even examples given in README do not render the same as shown. It is a big shame, it could be used for simple note taking wikilike purposes.

1 Like
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Hi @gorn,

Do you have any examples? Except the CSS problem with the mentioned graph above, everything works perfectly fine with the mark down editor. I’m very happy with the app.

5

Same here, I use it at home. Though I don’t do much fancy stuff. For a more complicated thing that can be shown externally, picoCMS is probably the better choice but for your own notes this is great.

1 Like
6

For notes I use my right hand and a pencil on the surface in Onenote :smiley: This will never hit these UX :smiley:

7

Looks like somebody likes Level1techs. :grin:

It would be awesome to see Mermaid.js support in the Notes app as well.

8

The graphs are from mermaid.js as far as I know and they are supported.

The following should be mermaid, so you could try that:

```
gantt
dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
title Projekt-Ablaufprojekt
section nicht-kritischer Bereich
abgeschl. Aufgabe :done, des1, 2014-01-06,2014-01-08
Aktive Aufgabe :active, des2, 2014-01-09, 3d
Zukünftige Aufgabe : des3, after des2, 5d
Zukünftige Aufgabe2 : des4, after des3, 5d
section kristische Aufgaben
abgeschl. im krit Bereich :crit, done, 2014-01-06,24h
A1 :crit, done, after des1, 2d
A2 :crit, active, 3d
zukünft. AufgabeXY :crit, 5d
Create tests for renderer :2d
Add to mermaid :1d
```

9

This all looks very nice and works for me with one exception:

Or block LaTeX $$\int_{a}^{b} x^2 dx$$

gives:

Or block LaTeX $\int_{a}^{b} x^2 dx: KaTeX parse error: $ within math mode$

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Hi @RainerEmrich

Please make sure you have an empty line before that block. Following works for me:

something

$$\int_{a}^{b} x^2 dx$$

something else
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Hi @Schmu,

this somehow works indeed. The visualisation is different than what is shown in the original post.

Latex

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No, not really. I opened an issue here:

13

Oh sorry, I thought you meant the Text editor with mark down app. Didn’t notice that you meant the Note app.

14

Is there a way to do the following?

  • Indicate that a document should be displayed in preview mode and not edit/combo mode?
  • Display the markdown file at the top of the directory, perhaps in a snippet with a more… link?

The use case for the second item is that I want to put in instructions/guidelines for the content in the directory and need all users to see it when they navigate.

15

I noticed the following:
The symbols for intended list are displayed the same.

I would expect:

  • Level 1: filled dot
  • Level 2: only circle with outline

Shall I file an issue for this?

Further, it would be great to have automatic conversion into a PDF.
Is this possible with workflows?

16

Hello,
discovering the App.
Is there any chance that relative links such as [[related_page]] is supported, so that clicking on it on the Markdown rendered mage directs to the corresponding page ?
That would be ideal in the perspective of the zettelkasten method.
Thanks.

1 Like
17

What’s the status of this editor, relative to GitHub - nextcloud/text: 📑 Collaborative document editing using Markdown ?

18

If you are asking about development you can check the github repos. Both apps are used for different purposes, but mostly overlap in features. You can always use both.

1 Like
19

Thanks. I guess I’m wondering more about the intent of the core text app vs this app, and any collaboration between the two. If they are filling separate needs and are separate development efforts, cool, competition is always great for us users/consumers. But it seems like there’s more overlap than not. If that is true and they address the same needs, why not merge efforts? If I’m wrong and there are significant differences, it would be helpful to have a feature comparison table so folks wondering which text/Markdown editor to use could make an informed decision.