Make some pre-releases?

[choldgraf]

In our last meeting, @jstac suggested that we could release the myst-parser and myst-nb projects in a "public beta" fashion, relatively soon. I think it could be a good idea to get some of these tools out there sooner than later. What do people think about:

• In the next few days, start telling twitter, open-source colleagues, etc about the MyST-parser for Sphinx
• After @AakashGfude's PR lands in MyST-NB and we have a week-or-so to test it out, do the same thing for MyST-NB

What do folks think about that?

And on the second point, we should also reach out to the nbsphinx project and see if they have any ideas for how we could dovetail our stacks into one another.

The one question I have here, is whether @chrisjsewell thinks that recent conversations about markdown-it-py should delay the "announcement" of MyST and the MyST parser. Chris, what do you think?

[jstac]

+1 in principle but it depends on @chrisjsewell . We all know things can happen fast when he gets an idea in his head 💡

[chrisjsewell]

See ExecutableBookProject/markdown-it-py 😄 Its largely done (see the README for details) and in markdown_it/doc_renderer.py is the initial port of the docutils renderer, which works exactly the same as the mistletoe one, and its now faster than mistletoe.

The main niggling issue is executablebooks/markdown-it-py#1.

Its pretty nice that you can configure any aspect of the syntax. I could envisage some of that configurability eventually bubbling up to the CLI:

md = (
    MarkdownIt()
    .use(front_matter_plugin)
    .use(myst_block_plugin)
    .use(myst_role_plugin)
    .disable('image')
    .enable('table')
)
md.render("some text")

[chrisjsewell]

Note the footnote extension also supports the inline feature discussed in executablebooks/MyST-Parser#98 (comment), you can configure math to use $...$ or \[....\], and with both, they recognize an equation label
which should mean you wouldn't have to use the math directive for this any more, i.e.:

$$s(w) = s_0 w \cdot \mathbb 1\{w \geq \hat w\}$$ (md:sav_ah)

instead of

```{math}
:label: md:sav_ah

s(w) = s_0 w \cdot \mathbb 1\{w \geq \hat w\}
```

(will have to see how this fits in with the docutils renderer)

[jstac]

That's awesome, love your work @chrisjsewell !

@najulizu, please not this simplified syntax. Please add some whitespace between equation and $$.

(Edit: This will work after the parsers are swapped.)

[choldgraf]

Ah one other thing - @chrisjsewell mentioned that markdown-it-py is nearly ready to go, but there's still another step of making the myst-parser parse using it, right?

[jstac]

Best to leave this until after the first round of blog posts / publicizing?

[choldgraf]

That was the question I wanted to ask @chrisjsewell - I guess the question is whether we think that switch will make any kind of differece for myst-parser...I don't think so, I think it's a purely-backend thing, but just wanted to make sure

[chrisjsewell]

done and dusted