jupyterlab-markup - a plugin for markdown-it in jupyterlab

[choldgraf]

@bollwyvl just pointed me to jupyterlab-markup from @agoose77, which seems to add functionality for markdown-it in JupyterLab. I don't know whether it is designed to be extensible for new plugins (e.g. the ones for MyST markdown), but perhaps it's something to look at for getting MyST support in JupyterLab.

[bollwyvl]

I did some fiddling around to get to something extensible, about 95% like the current marked output with off-the-shelf plugins: task lists, rewritten ./ links to /files/, anchored headers, etc.

• PR
• binder

With the way markdown-it loads plugins, making it generally extensible looks like about ten lines of boilerplate per simple plugin (this could be tightened up), while still being able to do complex ones with lots of config options.

My biggest concern, at least for notebooks, is that there would need to be a way to document which extensions are needed to properly render a document in a way that would be portable between renderers (nbconvert, lab, etc). My thinking is this would end up being a JSON schema which could eventually land in nbformat, a la:

metadata:
  jupyter:
    commonmark:
      extensions:
        - task-list
        - header-anchors
cells: []

So you'd at least get a warning that something wasn't going to be right. As to where that list came from, and how one might get it for their py/js/r/whatever renderer, remains mysterious, as the community/spec doesn't seem to have any sort of way to do this in a document, out of band, or whatever.

[chrisjsewell]

Yep cheers, looks promising 👍

[choldgraf]

good point about needing a metadata spec to define what extra markdown syntax may be inside. This seems like a much more principled way of doing it than just letting people put whatever random markdown they want in the notebooks :-)

[bollwyvl]

raised as an issue about metadata over there... agoose77/jupyterlab-markup#13

Also, the PR is looking pretty good, and has grown user configurable settings... a spin through the binder and notes would be greatly appreciated!

[agoose77]

@bollwyvl is very kind, but most of the input is his! 🙏