Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data

kevinkoning•about 3 hours ago

Markdown is a beautiful demonstration that document structure syntax can/should be simple. What most people do in Word is better done by just adjusting the document rendering/style, not the document structure...

I love the idea of extending markdown to include more visual elements, but if you're not careful you just reinvent HTML.

Here's my personal take on extending table syntax for charts. Easy to write, and if a renderer/parser understands the syntax you get a beautiful chart, and if it doesn't you get a table with slightly weird headings:

  | Month::x | Revenue::y1 | Cost::y2 |
  | -------- | ----------: | -------: |
  | Jan      | $82,000     | $51,000 |
  | Feb      | $91,000     | $56,000 |
  | Mar      | $95,000     | $58,000 |

rao-v•about 1 hour ago

Tables are the one thing in markdown where I’d prefer to emphasize edit ergonomics over good looking unrendered text. Making a quick manual change like adding column to a markdown table is just unfun. I’ve always thought a json like format that a linter can organize would be better.

Which is all to say I really like the table proposal here - adding an optional linter to make the data look tabular in unrendered markdown will make it even better

esafak•about 2 hours ago

What's the : in the divider?

microflash•about 2 hours ago

That's header alignment marker. If it's on right, the header cell is aligned to right.

amcaskill•about 2 hours ago

I work on a dashboarding / BI solution that is also built around markdown and clickhouse. www.evidence.dev

We moved to stripe's Markdoc variant for the component syntax last year and have been really happy with it. Models are good at writing it, people are good at reviewing it.

Here's an area chart that would issue a SQL query for weekly revenue totals:

``` {% area_chart data="my_table" x="date" y="sum(revenue)" date_grain="week" /%} ```

nzoschke•about 2 hours ago

Looks cool.

I continue to love Markdown and always push it a bit further than Commonmark, with frontmatter, schemas, code fence metadata too.

I've been enjoying https://djot.net/ as a superset of Markdown that is feels very well designed and extensible too.

You may look into its syntax and tooling for prior art or some extra lift.

I'm trying to get a djot extension in Zed for syntax highlighting if anyone minds adding a to help signal some community interest.

https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/pull/5206

woodydesign•about 1 hour ago

Very cool.

I’m a product designer, and I could totally see this fitting into my workflow for design briefs, strategy, review, and crit docs. Markdown is too simple, and Figma is too visual. This feels like a great middle ground.

phyzix5761•about 2 hours ago

Nice project. But at what point does Markdown just become Emacs Org-Mode? At least with Emacs you can write Lisp to make your document do anything you want.

arikrahman•about 1 hour ago

I'm struggling to figure out why I wouldn't just use Emacs Org or even Typst for this use case.

AlecSchueler•about 2 hours ago

Deepening on who your users are you might also say "at least with markdown they write Lisp and make their documents do whatever they like."

ifh-hn•about 1 hour ago

I'm using quarto for this sort of thing.

Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data

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