What I miss in Markdown (and Hugo)

I like Markdown for its simplicity. Simplicity comes with limitations. There are some features that I miss in Markdown or it is possible to extend Markdown to support these cases, but there is no support from the Hugo side (static site generator I use).

Note: I can’t use JS to do additional rendering on the client-side, because:

• I cross-post my articles, which means that articles should contain only HTML and images (JS will not work on 3-rd party website)
• I care about the speed of my website and each JS script is a penalty for performance

Features

Diagrams

I would like to create diagrams with-in markdown. Something like this:

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

Which would render:

Diagrams can be described, for example, with: flowchart.js, js-sequence-diagrams, mermaid, PlantUML, WaveDrom, Viz.js, vega, ditaa, etc.

Support :

• Markdown: Yes
• Hugo: No
• Editor preview: Yes

My workaround: use JS script which detects code-blocks with diagrams, renders them, and replaces code-blocks with the rendered images.

Euler diagrams

See examples here:

• eulerAPE
• What is the best software for drawing a VENN diagram?

Support :

• Markdown: Yes
• Hugo: No
• Editor preview: No

XKCD-style

I’d like to use XKCD-style for diagrams that are meant to illustrate something but are not based on scientific data.

For example, xkcd #1064:

Support :

• Markdown: Yes
• Hugo: No
• Editor preview: doesn’t matter

Math notation

I don’t need anything fancy - some Greek letters, superscript, and subscript. Most of the time copy-paste Unicode characters, for example: Σ¹. But there are some edge cases, for example, there is no superscript variation for the asterisk (*).

It would be nice to use AsciiMath inside Markdown, like this:

Inline:

$Sigma^**$

Which would render: Σ^*

Block:

$$
sum_(i=1)^n i^3=((n(n+1))/2)^2
$$

Which would render:

Support :

• Markdown: Possible to extend
• Hugo: No
• Editor preview: yes 1, 2

2-column layout

Sometimes I need to show two images side-by-side, so that reader can compare them easily. I can use a table for this, but it looks ugly (a table has a header and borders). Plus tables don’t work for code-blocks.

Support :

• Markdown: No

Side notes

It would be nice to support side notes, like in Tufte layout. Theoretically, it is possible to reuse footnotes:

Here's a simple footnote,[^1] and here's a longer one.[^bignote]
Indent paragraphs to include them in the footnote.
`{ my code }`
Add as many paragraphs as you like.

Support :

• Markdown: Yes?
• Hugo: No
• Editor preview: No

Other ideas

Collspan and rowspan for tables, superscript (30^th^), subscript (H~2~O).

Alternatives

Hugo

I’m considering 11ty. Also need to check pandoc.

Markdown

• reStructuredText, see Please don’t write your documentation in Markdown
• Asciidoctor

Comments

[Phil Ashby]

Looks like Hugo can call out to other formatters than the built-in Markdown, in particular Asciidoctor and reStructuredText: gohugo.io/content-management/formats/

Not sure how that works when you are trying to use cross-file features like references though.. Hugo's pipeline seems to render into HTML before applying it's own features.

[stereobooster]

Thanks for the help!

The problem is I don't want to have much dependencies (because they tend to break with a time). If I'm gonna add something, I could as well go with 11ty. I hate node.js dependencies, but I'm using it anyway (postcss and parcel). And in 11ty they use markdown-it, which I can hack any way I want (I already use something similar to prerender diagrams).

And you know what is the most ironic. I was ok with my current setup, but I can't just write math expression which uses asterisk in superscript (I can write HTML, but it is so annoying that I need to use HTML).