hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3254.txt

Episode: 3254
Title: HPR3254: The Markdown editor Retext
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3254/hpr3254.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:45:41

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3254 for the May 21st of January 2021.
Today's show is entitled The Markdown Editor Retext.
It is hosted by MrX, and is about 25 minutes long, and can remain an explicit flag.
The summary is, in this episode I come at the Markdown Editor Retext.
I found this useful when creating show notes.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Hello and welcome Hacker Public Radio audience.
My name is MrX, and welcome to this podcast.
As usual, I'd like to start by thanking the people at HBR for making the service available
to us on these here intertubes.
HBR is a community led podcast provided by the community for the community.
That means you can contribute to.
So why don't you pick up a microphone, an MP3 player, a phone, a computer if you've
got one, a laptop, a tablet, a new bud, and hit record on your device and send in a
show.
There's going to be a lot of effort to make the whole process streamlined, so if you're
all contributed to have more shows than we know to do with, you might even enjoy it.
Anywho, well, it's just for context, it's the 1st of January, so happy new year and
may your lumb, I always leak, leak, not leak.
So anyway, a few days till I'm back at the jaded slate, so I've still got a wee bit time
on my hand, so I thought I'd pulled to get another show.
And I thought about it because I was actually, I'd just recently recorded another show,
and I thought I was thinking about the process of how I'd go about doing this.
And it's changed slightly recently, because what I tend to do was I would write up my
show notes, sometimes I would be all prepared and I'd have my show notes written on this
case, I'd have almost no show notes and just off the cuff.
I would show notes together at some point, and I'd very well do that just in Libri Office
sort of thing, you know, and just bat it and whatnot.
And I heavily rely on the spell checking, and it's actually like, it's my, I'm terrible
with spelling and grammar, so that's very useful.
But myself and Dave Morris had a chat while back on HPR 1832, sorry it was 3167, HPR
3167 it was sorry, and we're talking about sending in show notes and whatnot, and he
was saying, he mentioned, and his show notes is given what HPR prefers, and the processing
HPR show notes is his experiences, HTML preferred but needs to be high quality.
So you know, a tiny bit of dabbling with HTML, but it's been so long ago, should make
lots of mistakes for that.
Next one, next preferable option, mark down if well-formatted.
This is the easiest to deal with, so I thought, oh, that's interesting.
And then finally, plain text that gets converted to Markdown by volunteers, so somebody has
to process that text.
I always assume that, you know, if you use text, I guess plain text if it's, is better than
badly formatted HTML or Markdown, particularly HTML, I would imagine, because the scripting
that is done behind the scenes all goes wonky, basically, if it's not done correctly.
So I was always a bit nervous about sending in HTML, and for somebody who's never thought
about Markdown, and David said that, a grad September, you know, maybe you could point
to a website where you could get, you could pop in some, some, Markdown and see how
it looks, and in that way, you could create your Markdown and send it in.
But then he told me about a tool called ReTextRETXT, and I hadn't ever heard of this before,
and it's a standalone program that you can install on Linux, I don't know if there's a,
is there a Windows version for it, I'll just, so I've just had a wee look at the website
for ReText, and it says, um, to install ReText, make sure that you have Python 3.6 or later installed,
and run pip space install space reText. By default, it installs system wide,
pass dash dash user for stalling into the user's home directory. You can also manually download
the table from PYPL as a link here. ReText requires the following Python modules to run,
pip will install them automatically, so it's pi QT5, 5.6 or later, and markups 2.0 or later.
I also say we recommend Markdown, from Markdown support, docutils for restructure,
tech support, and PY enchant for spell checking support. So yeah, that's information from
official website. I'm running a Boone 2 here, so that's what I'm doing anyway, it's in the,
it's in the repo, and I think the, um, the current version is 701, so the latest version,
as of the first generation, is 7.1.0, but in the, in the repository for Boone 2.7.0,
one, so it's not the very latest, but good enough, it's fine. So ReText is a, as a Markdown editor sort
of thing, so, uh, but basically I had, um, I copied it, I still actually, from a previous episode,
copied the text from MS off, it's nothing, from, from LibreOffice, and pasted it into the, uh,
a ReText, and worked on it there. Um, and, uh, one of the things, so, so when you, you open,
one of the things, when I first opened it, I wasn't doing spell checking for me, and, uh,
if you go, or simply for, for UK, um, I went to the edit menu, and then I went to spell check,
and then I hit, uh, select local, and it said enter local name, now, example, EN underscore US,
for, US obviously. So, um, uh, for myself, I just put EN underscore GB, and, uh, set as default,
and, and then that, that, that, that then started the checking, uh, spell checking one of myself.
So, that's, that's good, that's very useful. Uh, whether I'll dispense with LibreOffice,
I'm not sure, I might do, I might do, I might just just do everything in, in, in ReText.
But, um, when you open up, you get a, uh, a single window, um, and you can, you can, you can,
you can beat your, your markdown in, in, in the, in the window, and flip between the markdown,
and how it will actually look, uh, by pushing the preview button, uh, did I actually explain what
markdown is, do people know what markdown is? Uh, what does, what does Wikipedia say for markdown?
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using plain text,
using a plain text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created markdown in 2004,
as a markup language that is appealing to the human users in its source form. Markdown is
widely used in blogging, instant messaging, online forums, collaboration software, document pages,
and even readme files. Markdown is the predominant markup language of Microsoft Docs website.
If you go to the help menu in ReText and click on, uh, about ReText, there's a link that says
markdown syntax, that takes the website, um, um, daring, farball.net, which tells you all a bit markdown.
And it says, uh, markdown as a text to HTML conversion tool for web writers, markdown allows you
to write using an easy to read, easy to write plain text format, then converted to structured,
valid, X HTML or HTML. So you can see why that appeals to, to the HPR, um, people behind the
scenes, um, such as our Dave Morris, because, uh, it greatly simplifies turning the, the, the,
the text into HTML. And, and on, in this site, it gives you examples of all different, uh,
uh, formats and stuff. But I mean, as I say, uh, how I, how I started using it, uh, as, uh,
I created my text, I've battled it down on, in LibreOffice, you know, if it was a, if it was a
heading, I'd make it bold, underline or whatever. Um, just so I could think about structuring the
document, just without thinking too much about the, because even thinking about,
marking, which is very simple, can maybe, until you've used it, maybe, um,
stuff for the flow slightly, um, but, uh, and then you just paste it into the main window,
um, and then you can add your formatting yourself, so it's like, that's a heading. So, if I,
for example, um, type, this is a heading into the main window, and I'll highlight it,
and there's a formatting button on the toolbar, I'll push that and I click header,
then it beeps a hash at the beginning of the, this is a heading, um, and if I hit the preview button,
um, it gives you nice big heading, this is a heading, uh, a bit another bit of text below that,
uh, this is not a heading, it's very basic stuff, this, um, if preview button, and it isn't a heading,
because it's, because you haven't prepended it with a, with a hash. Now, you can get different
levels of, of heading by having more hashies. So, for example, each, one hash at the beginning of
the line, um, is a, is the biggest, is the, is the biggest heading you can get. So, if I'd put
two hashies here, so you can just type in rather than using the, the formatting button, because I
don't think that gives you options for multiple levels of heading, um, and it's become bold as well,
and when I hit the preview, it, it, it, when it's a heading, it, or, or I don't know if it does
other things, but when it's a heading, it does turn it bold so you can see where the headings are
within the actual markdown before you even go to the preview, um, so when I hit the preview button,
you go, I've got a, a bold, large font saying this is a heading, and the line below it, which,
as I think, as, as two hashies on, uh, beside it, now we say, this is not heading, but it is actually
heading. What I should do, this is heading, heading one, I should say, and the next one should
say, this is heading two, I suppose, this is heading two, let's put, uh, another line and put
three hashies after it, one, two, three, this is heading, I should say, level three,
uh, yeah, so heading one is the biggest heading two, smaller, heading three, smaller still,
so that's how you do headings, um, and of course, the way when you're looking at a markdown,
you can kind of look at the text, so I, I see what it's doing, I can just do it myself with it,
pushing the button, sometimes it's easier just to copy and paste the, the, the, the text to format it
rather than actually pushing the button, so for example, um, this is bold, so bold, if I highlight
that and push the formatting button and click on bold, it puts, uh, two asterisks, two asterisks
at the beginning of this is bold and two asterisks at the end of this is bold,
and when I hit the preview button, it's bold, so what else have we got?
italics, what, I wonder what italics is, italics, italics, italics, how do you do italics,
push that, oh, it's a single asterisks either side apparently for italics, and it actually,
even in the, um, the retakes main window, it still shows it as italics with that, with the asterisk,
but when you hit the preview button, it, it formats it as it would finally look,
uh, nice, but you touch is seeing that, so you can kind of get an idea of what is doing,
even with the, the, the tags or whatever you call these characters either side basic,
you can still tell that it's italics basically, um, right, bullet, what's a bullet,
what does that look like? It looks like it's, it puts one, two, uh, one, two, three spaces,
and in a asterisk, and that's how a bullet is done by the look of it, and when I go to preview,
yeah, that's how you do a bullet, um, you, you can, you know, you can flip between the preview and
the plain text or the mark then I should say, um, but there's also, if you've got a nice
widescreen monitor, uh, you can also, there's a wee arrow next to the preview button, and there's
a thing called live preview, which is also control L, and that gives you your two, two pains,
so you can actually see what's good, how it's going to look live as you type, you can also, uh,
add symbols, degrees, divide, dollar, uh, there's a whole slew of them, minus, there's a whole slew of
these things, symbols that you can add, and I'll say, once you click on that, it'll put the text
that's required, and you can say, oh, I see what it means, for example, a degree is an ampersand
D-E-G, so if you say 23 ampersand D-E-G, then you get 23, and a degree symbol, for example,
um, I'm just thinking of something else about, uh, retext, so looking at the, um,
as you get the help menu, get, get help online, I don't think that worked actually when I clicked on that,
I can't remember, and there's about retext, which tells you the version, um, simple but powerful editor
for markdown and restructured text, author by Demetre Sashniv, 2011 to 2017, and then below
three links, one to the website, one to markdown syntax, and finally one to restructured text syntax,
and then you've also got, there's also about QT, and they are actually, you're interested,
uh, in edit menu, you've got undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, spell check, which I mentioned, uh,
fine text, change editor font, change preview font, not bored, missing many of that,
a default markup, uh, it's, it's markdown, and that's, that's what I'm using, and,
if you're using it for HBR, then I would imagine that's how you'd leave it,
formatting, bold, italics, underlying, tool, beak, tool, like, tool, you, that's a kind of shortcut, I guess,
um, and then there's, there's various other options, I'm, maybe I'm going to go through them all here,
there's maybe too many, um, preferences, automatically saved documents, documents,
automatically open last document on startup, restore window geometry,
use live preview by default, uh, open external links and re-text window,
uh, because as it stands, if you click on a link, it'll open in your web browser,
uh, markdown syntax extensions comma separated, yeah, so I think there's extensions you can add to that,
I don't know, I haven't looked into any of that because this is just, it's sufficient really for,
for, uh, HPR, it's, uh, generous shoes, bullets, and, and bold, and italics, and headings, and
there's not much else, really, um, enable synchronized schooling for markdown, that's ticked,
highlight current line number, that could be handy, I haven't got that ticked, uh, show line numbers,
that's not ticked either, uh, tab key inserts spaces, that was ticked, tabular width four,
uh, draw vertical line at column zero, uh, icon theme name, style sheet file none, and that's,
that's all your, your preferences basically, you've got a full screen mode that, uh,
help you if you've got a small screen or, or to help your flow so you don't get distracted by
the software and about you, I guess, really, finally, the, the file menu you've got, uh, new,
open, open recently, show directory, I'll give you an interesting save, save as,
um, next tab, previous tab, yeah, because you're going to have open, you're going to open multiple
documents and tabs, uh, expo, that's, that's interesting, uh, I didn't know that export is HTML,
export is ODT, export is PDF, wow, let's try exporting this PDF, just, just for the fun of it,
name and I'll give it to, uh, re-text, uh, dot p, okay, let's say that, assume that worked,
um, print, print preview, and quit, so, if I go to my file manager, well there we go,
re-text.pdf, click on that, oh it worked, look at that, that's quite neat,
and I also can generate HTML as well, and, uh, so that, that's, yeah, that's, that's quite nice,
it's a really nice handy tool to, to, very easily inform at, um, your show notes, uh, before sending
it into, uh, HPR, uh, really handy, I didn't just know it existed, um, the, uh, how do we search,
of course I'm doing this all out of order, how do we search at the beginning when I was,
before I started this, to see if re-text was mentioned in HPR, and if somebody had, uh,
already covered this, because you've got to watch that, uh, not as a problem in, in doing it a
second time, uh, but, um, since this was going to rush and pull together quickly, uh, if it had
been, there's a very good chance it would have done, been done much more thoroughly, ha, so,
I wouldn't have done it if somebody else had previously done it, um, sorry, sorry, can, um,
anyway, the, the, um, well, I did a research on HPR site, and the only two references to, uh,
re-text, there was, uh, a reference to it from, uh, from show 1832,
uh, by Be Easy, an excellent show about, uh, pan doc, and how he uses Markdown, uh, so,
he mentions that, that he also uses re-text, that's totally also uses,
and of course, the fact that the one, um, the episode that me and Dave did, um, episode, uh,
HPR 3167, I can't remember what the title of that one was, I'll include the, uh, links to it in,
in my show notes, which I will prepare using re-text.
So, some final thoughts, uh, after actually finishing the recording, and, um,
creating my, uh, my show notes, uh, using re-text, of course.
Um, I find that, the fact that using re-text, um, it kind of disciplines me to, um,
uh, and I put more, more thoughtful, um, I put more titles, and, um, I guess at the Be Easy, you
actually see that it's just piles of paragraphs, and the, and without meaningful headings,
uh, titles, it doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't,
look awfully great, you know, so that, I guess that's, that's the beauty,
because I'm a original, uh, LibreOffice version, I didn't have some of these, these headings.
Uh, it also helped me to create, uh, meaningful descriptions for, um, for links, you know, for
internet links, and, uh, which hopefully helps, um, accessibility for visually impaired.
I do remember Ken and Dave talking a multiple occasions about having descriptions for links,
and, um, you know, it's not, yeah, that's a good idea, but invariably, if you did it in LibreOffice,
I would just say, see link below or something like that, and then I'd have, have the, the, the text,
and then I don't know how they volunteer, we'd, we'd interpret that, and, but, um, you, you see how,
confusing that looks on the page, so, um, you, you, that, it makes it very easy to actually write
some words about what the link is, highlight it, hit the link button, and then, um, thoughtfully,
they put, uh, after the description, they put, they put in brackets, URL, so that's a prompt for you,
to just stick the URL on, in, in the second part, uh, and then of course, it's formatted, you have
lovely, um, descriptive links with a URL, um, embedded, so that, that's very useful. Um,
I actually found out also that last I was, um, using retext and, um, dual panel mode,
dual pin mode, um, live preview, it was called, uh, where you can see the, uh, mark,
down version, and final version, side by side, it, um, it was, uh, really quite useful,
and, uh, although I don't have a widescreen monitor, it was, uh, more than wide enough to,
to cater for it, so that, that, that's well worth, uh, doing, I'll probably use it a bit more.
Um, maybe when I'm, when you first start, you can just bat it down, uh, in, on one,
one pain, um, and then, as, as you're finalizing it, use a dual pain, and maybe that, that's
where I did it anyway, um, so it goes end up with a, a better, more polished, I think I end up
with better, uh, more polished show notes, uh, that hopefully needs fewer and,
fewer input from the band of HPR volunteers working behind the scenes, so, um, yeah, I think it's,
it's well worth giving a, uh, a, a go, uh, show notes are, are, are not,
they're not at that arduous, you know, and, um, a show with no show notes is far better than no show at all,
so I don't feel that you can't, uh, produce a show, if you don't produce show notes, uh,
HPR accept any show, uh, without show notes, um, so don't feel you have to, but, but, uh,
it's obviously a bit official, and, uh, re-text, well, it just, it just makes it so much easier,
it's easier for yourself, and, uh, and easier for, uh, the volunteers behind the scenes,
so if you're going to be pulling some, some show notes together for HPR, um,
why don't you give it a go? Uh, you might find it quite useful,
has that another letter, and I think it probably is, uh, I hope I didn't ramble and I hope I made
it a bit of sense, and I think that's about it, um, so, so finally, if you want to contact me,
you, you, you can contact me at MrX, at hprgooglemail.com, that's mrx80hpr, the at symbol googlemail.com,
so until next time, thank you, and goodbye.
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