[tex-live] Information/question from the CTAN team

[Philip Taylor]

Gerd Neugebauer wrote:

> FYI: The CTAN Web site already renders .md files if they are present.
> The format understood is documented in http://www.ctan.org/help/pkg-readme
> ...and there is a test bed under http://www.ctan.org/markdown to try out, how a
> file would be displayed.

I know nothing about "markdown" (I think I stopped learning about IT
developments at the end of the 20th century; very little worthwhile
seems to have emerged since then) but I am not impressed with CTAN's
attempt to render the "markdown" sample which I extracted from Wikipædia :

> Heading
> =======
> 
> Sub-heading
> -----------
>  
> ### Another deeper heading
>  
> Paragraphs are separated
> by a blank line.
> 
> Leave 2 spaces at the end of a line to do a  
> line break
> 
> Text attributes *italic*, **bold**, 
> `monospace`, ~~strikethrough~~ .
> 
> A [link](http://example.com).
> [27]
> 
> Shopping list:
> 
>   * apples
>   * oranges
>   * pears
> 
> Numbered list:
> 
>   1. apples
>   2. oranges
>   3. pears
> 
> The rain---not the reign---in
> Spain.

The main heading is not set off by an \hrule (does not appear in the
Wikipædia example HTML, although it appears in the rendered output, so
this behaviour may be intentional within CTAN), end-of-line double space
is ignored, and the lists are wrongly parsed and formatted.

Philip Taylor