Editing and Tracked Change Support for Markdown

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dreifsnider
Posts: 130
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 10:06 pm

Editing and Tracked Change Support for Markdown

Post by dreifsnider »

Hi Oxygen Support,

I would like to request the ability to edit and make tracked changes/comments in Markdown files using Content Fusion as a Reviewer. We have some teams who author content in Markdown and would like the ability to use Content Fusion as a review mechanism for these files. It would also be great if Content Fusion could have the side-by-side preview capability that Oxygen XML Author has for Markdown files.

Thank you!
Daniel
cristi_talau
Posts: 509
Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2014 4:22 pm

Re: Editing and Tracked Change Support for Markdown

Post by cristi_talau »

Hello,

We discussed a bit internally about the review capabilities for Markdown files and it seems to be more complicated than for XML. The challenge comes from the fact that Markdown documents do not have "processing instructions" that we use to represent comments and tracked changes.

The options we have are:
  • use a special Markdown syntax for comments. One option is to use HTML comments orHTML <span> elements both will appear in the generated HTML. Another option here is to use some comments that are never used in text (https://stackoverflow.com/a/20885980) - these will not appear in the output, but will be paragraph-level instead of word-level, and might not be compatible with the Markdown flavor that you use.
  • Another approach is to store the comments externally (in the Content Fusion database) while the Markdown file is part of a review task and leave no trace when the review task finishes and you save the modified version in the Git repository.
Do you have a preference about any of these options? Do you happen to use a specific syntax for comments now?

Regarding the live preview, I added your vote to our existing issue. I was wondering if you use a special Markdown syntax and which tool you use to generate the HTML / DITA for production.

Best,
Cristian
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