Markdown Tips by Edward Delaporte

The usual VSCode plugins add a lot of weird junk (telemetry, perhaps), so I decided to start using brute force and minimal GoLang code to convert my Markdown into HTML.

Setup

go install github.com/gomarkdown/mdtohtml@latest
mdtohtml -h

Generate document

mdtohtml.exe -css https://edward.delaporte.us/css/edthedev.css .\Dashboard.md > Dashboard.html

VSCode Settings:

"command-runner.terminal.name": "runCommand",
"command-runner.terminal.autoClear": true,
"command-runner.terminal.autoFocus": true,
"command-runner.commands": {
    "markdown to HTML": "mdtohtml.exe -css https://edward.delaporte.us/css/edthedev.css ${file} > ${file}.html",
	"HTML to PDF": "wkhtmltopdf.exe ${file}.html ${file}.pdf",
},

Then Ctrl+Shift+P, Run Command and select markdown to HTML.

Setup

Install wkhtml2pdf.exe somewhere on my path.

Use

wkhtmltopdf.exe .\Dashboard.md.html dash.pdf

Usually when I have a block of text indented, I do not want that block to split across a print-out page break, when converting to PDF.

Conversion to PDF can happen when I do it on purpose, or when someone prints a webpage I built with Markdown.

For these cases, I like to inject this bit of inline HTML, directly into the Markdown document:

<!-- Avoid page breaks within code blocks -->
<style> pre { page-break-inside: avoid; } </style>

Obviously, it is readable to anyone reading the Markdown source. But for every other view (Markdown preview, HTML and PDF) it is correctly hidden.