Recurring #TechWriting issue that I still haven't found a good solution for:
Is anyone aware of a decently reliable automation for reformatting #Markdown text that previously used line length limits of 80 characters and forced line wraps, to one sentence per line?
Must preserve all Markdown formatting including tables and fenced code blocks.
(If you think this is trivial and can be solved with a sprinkling of regex — nope.)
Boosts appreciated!
@xahteiwi Best guess: Convert to HTML and back.
Identifying sentences remains a hard problem, but the rest should be mostly mechanical. I'd start with Pandoc, hoping that it can be configured to create Markdown in the required format.
@xahteiwi Ah, nice! 👍
That's probably the best you can get without throwing some serious NLP at it. Curious to see if I'm missing something!
Boosted because I don't have an answer. TeX has some pretty good heuristics for working out when a . is a full stop that ends a sentence, but they're not 100% reliable. I don't think this is something I'd want to do without carefully reading the output. It's probably better to just define that style for changes and tell people to reformat an entire paragraph when they make a change anywhere.
@david_chisnall That's exactly what I'm doing now, but it's causing bad blood with infrequent contributors. They make a big change and because the rest of the specific Markdown doc they're editing uses 80-char lines, that's how they format their patch, with the best of intentions. Then I ask them to reformat to one sentence per line, which is manual and tedious and they're rightfully annoyed. I want to remove that tedium and annoyance.
When I've done this manually, I've done:
It's the almost that makes this an annoying manual process.
@david_chisnall Right. And now you also want line breaks after exclamation and question marks. All unless they're enclosed in backticks. And of course not within fenced code blocks. Or tables.
@xahteiwi @david_chisnall @OmegaPolice What about quotes?
> When the terminal says "Error! Run again" you do as it says.
Probably shouldn't be wrapped at all, should it?
Then again, that's just the same as the backticks.
Not convinced this cannot be done with regex...
@xahteiwi I did. The more precise problem statement in the post I directly replied to, however, sounded compatible with regex.
But I won't bother you anymore, sorry.
@OmegaPolice Nested like "a 'b "c" d' e"? Or just different styles like "a 'b <c> d' e"?
Also, what rules actually do apply for quoted sentences?
> It says: "Something went wrong. Check the logs!"
Would that be wrapped after "wrong."? Probably, that quote could get really long
Then again
> When the output says "Something went wrong. Check the logs!" you should do as it says.
Probably shouldn't be wrapped.
The rules seem underspecified, so doing it automatically seems impossible.
Florian Haas
Raphael
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
JPL