Archive for the ‘Lightweight markup language’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/03
I needed the portable version of [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark on Chocolatey (unlike the [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | CrystalDiskMark (Install) package). Luckily I found the auto-update package [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | CrystalDiskInfo (Portable) and knew both that CrystalDiskMark is from the same author as CrystalDiskInfo, and that their code is on GitHub like the Chocolatey package.
Given I had a the below chocolatey-packages/automatic/crystaldiskinfo.portable as a template, I asked the CrystalDiskInfo (Portable) package maintainer if they were willing to maintain CrystalDiskMark (portable) as well and was glad the response was “yes”: [Wayback/Archive] Portabe CrystalDiskMark similar to the current CrystalDiskInfo? · Issue #159 · mkevenaar/chocolatey-packages
So for my link-archive:
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Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: 159, 16 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20
With the constant influx of JavaScript programmers, it keeps worth repeating that you should always run JavaScript in strict mode via "use strict"; (like in the past Visual Basic 6 developers should use option strict and option explicit) to forget risky JavaScript syntax like implicit ocal constants (which were removed from the documentation in the 2009 ECMAScript 5 specification for JavaScript), and every codeline should have a test code covering it, especially for comparisons involving non-strict behaviour like the use of leading zeros.
As of the succeeding 2015 standard (ECMAScript 6), octal numbers in JavaScript start with 0o or 0O followed by a series of octal digits.
Oh, and the history of octal in computing of course has to do with 6-bit systems and also lead to 6-six bit character codes including BCD character encoding..
My tweet back earlier this year: [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”
Inhteritence:
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Posted in B, BASIC, C, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MarkDown, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, VB6, Visual BASIC | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/19
Last week, I wrote that I switched to Visual Studio Code for most of my text based coding: Visual Studio Code: blazingly fast text expansion with Emmet.
I also use vscode for documentation and text writing, which – yes sometimes I am a copy/paste person too – means you want a bit more flexibility than just copying the selected text.
In most of my previous development tools, either the tool itself, or a plugin, would allow me to copy the word under the cursor if none was selected.
I wanted to change that behaviour too and become more flexible.
So I did some searches:
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Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, Software Development, Visual Studio and tools, vscode Visual Studio Code | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/17
Every now and then you bump into an interesting post on a workflow you already have but did not know the name for.
This time it is [Wayback/Archive] Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method which has this nice definition:
A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.
I thought a bit about it and it feels quite a bit like this blog: the ~5k draft posts at the time of writing are similar to a Zettelkasten: short notes with title and links either internally or externally.
These drafts are private, but the actual blog posts are either public (already published: some 8k at the time of writing) or queued for publication (some 2 years at the time of writing).
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Posted in Blogging, Development, documentation, Knowledge Worker, LifeHacker, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, reStructuredText, SocialMedia, Software Development | Tagged: developer, Productivity, Python, shorts, tips | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/22
For my list archive; need to check this out because reStructuredText by LeXtudio Inc. got redesigned, deferring much of its behaviour to Esbonio.
Anyway:
For me, figuring that out under pressure how to get this to working was too much, so I deferred that to a later point in time and perform a reStructuredText to Markdown conversion in stead (I wasn’t using very esoteric .RST features, and since most people use Markdown anyway it made the documents even more accessible for others to extend). Links on that conversion:
Both Markdown and reStructuredText are problematic for background images, so I opted to cut the conference background slide in half, put the top part above the title, and the bottom half below the final part of the presentation, as this didn’t really work well either:
Oh, and for Visual Studio Code:
Queries:
--jeroen
Posted in Development, Lightweight markup language, reStructuredText, Software Development | Tagged: 22728, 3277 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/22
Many Markdown documents on GitHub have three dashes (---) at the top (and rendered a horizontal table displays).
I didn’t know this markdown construct, and it appears to be GitHub specific: it is a way to render YAML metadata (for instance used while blogging).
So I searched for [Wayback/Archive] three dashes table markdown – Google Search and found [Wayback/Archive] Viewing YAML Metadata in your Documents | The GitHub Blog.
Well, actually… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Blogging, Configuration Management, Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, YAML | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/15
I have a lot of old Power Point slide decks that I want to reuse in current presentations. By now however, I learned prepare all my presentation stuff in either Markdown or reStructuredText: far easier to publish and put under version control.
After searching, I could only find one tool that is still maintained doing a decent job doing a PowerPoint to Markdown conversion: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ssine/pptx2md: a pptx to markdown converter. The tools which works great, in big part of PowerPoint content being highly structured with styles like title, subtitle and various heading levels and content types.
The thing it does not document is the prerequisites, which are these:
- a
venv (which, despite having used Python quite often, but not proficient in it, still makes me nervous: one forgotten step and you pip everything in your global environment).This links helps me every time [Wayback/Archive] Install packages in a virtual environment using pip and venv – Python Packaging User Guide. From it, I created this little table:
Steps for setting up and using a Python virtual environment
| Step |
*n*x/MacOS |
Windows |
Comment |
| 1. |
python3 -m venv .venv |
py -m venv .venv |
Only needed once |
| 2. |
source .venv/bin/activate |
.venv\Scripts\activate |
Switch to virtual environment |
| 3. |
which python |
where python |
Check if python is used from the virtual environment (should result in
.venv/bin/python on *n*x/MacOS or
.venv\Scripts\python on Windows) |
| 4. |
which pip |
where pip |
Check if pip is used from the virtual environment (should result in
.venv/bin/pip on *n*x/MacOS or
.venv\Scripts\pip on Windows) |
| 5. |
./.venv/bin/pptx2md</precode
|
.venv\bin\pptx2md |
Force a module which didn’t add itself to the path when installed via pip |
| 6. |
deactivate |
deactivate |
Leave the virtual environment |
- missed during
pip install pptx2md (in order I discovered them):
Future enhancements
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Posted in Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Office, Power Point, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, venv | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/17
Finally an easier way to convert Office documents (and other formats) to markdown: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown. (after Google added a Markdown export feature to Google Docs about half a year ago, and basic Markdown formatting about 2 years ago – see below):
There are quite a few dependencies in [Wayback/Archive] markitdown/pyproject.toml at main · microsoft/markitdown · GitHub, so be prepared for that.
Supported formats (added links for clarity):
The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.)
It presently supports:
- PDF (.pdf)
- PowerPoint (.pptx)
- Word (.docx)
- Excel (.xlsx)
- Images (EXIF metadata, and OCR)
- Audio (EXIF metadata, and speech transcription)
- HTML (special handling of Wikipedia, etc.)
- Various other text-based formats (csv, json, xml, etc.)
Google was first though:
- [Wayback/Archive] Google Workspace Updates: Compose with Markdown in Google Docs on web
- [Wayback/Archive] Google Workspace Updates: Import and export Markdown in Google Docs
There is speculation on why Microsoft introduced it just now ranging from “they need it for AI training” to “just late to the game”. I’m with the latter. Apple is even later, so if you want to convert Apple Notes to markdown, then you can use [Wayback/Archive] Import from Apple Notes – Obsidian Help.
Via various sources, including:
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Posted in CSV, Development, Excel, HTML, HTML5, JSON, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Office, PDF, Power Point, Power User, Software Development, Word, XML/XSD | Tagged: MarkDown, Python | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/08
Apparently I was living under a stone since the 2015 introduction of [Wayback/Archive] Paste to Markdown:
Paste to Markdown
Instructions
- Find the text to convert to Markdown (e.g., in another browser tab)
- Copy it to the clipboard (
Ctrl+C, or ⌘+C on Mac)
- Paste it into this window (
Ctrl+V, or ⌘+V on Mac)
- The converted Markdown will appear!
The conversion is carried out by to-markdown, a Markdown converter written in JavaScript and running locally in the browser.
The “to-markdown” I did already know (see A few HTML to Markdown converters written in javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP and C#) but has been renamed from [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – domchristie/to-markdown: An HTML to Markdown converter written in JavaScript into then “turndown” repository below.
More links:
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Posted in Development, HTML, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/03/29
I’ve switched to either Markdown or reStructuredText for documentation purposes a while ago.
Often Twitter threads or Tweets are a useful addition to that, so it makes sense being able to convert them to a more portable format, especially since both Markdown and reStructuredText render well on GitHub (including Gists) and GitLab (including Snippets).
So here are some links that hopefully will get me going in the future:
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, reStructuredText, Software Development | 1 Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 