I had decided to do a markdown converter as a small summer project in order to gain more experience with rust.
It has taken far longer than I thought it would, in part due to excessive (for Ireland) heat but mostly due to the rabbit-hole that Markdown ended up being.
The end result is I ended up creating my own flavor of markdown.
It is both stricter than Commonmark, yet at the same time more permissive.
Stricter:
* __ is no longer used for <strong>, only ** is.
* Lazy continuation is disallowed.
* Inline spans now have double identifiers.
* < and > to << and >>
* The same happens with code spans.
Permissive: * Extensions: * Tables. * Spoilers. * Strikethrough. * Leading whitespace no longer triggers a code block, so it is now possible to properly align headers.
I honestly don't expect anyone besides myself to use it.
The existing flavors have been well established, and I dont have the clout of Gitlab/Github/Bitbucket/Reddit to get folks to use it.
Not only that, this converter is currently a mess I have to split up for readability.
I am also pretty sure that there are some nuanced bugs in it however I am pretty sure the idea behind the changes is sound.
As a summer project thought it is mostly successful, I have gained a decent bit more proficiency with rust.
The conversion has no external dependencies (serde and toml are to read the optional config files).
It also is the first crate I have pushed to crates.io.
If you want to read about the rabbit-hole I fell down please direct your attention to: [background].
It builds off of existing markdown but has some significant changes.
If you want to see the actual implementation please look at breaking changes.