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Image floats for PHP & Markdown

- Posted in Wanted by

One of the best features of the wonderful "MDwiki" tool is its ability to float images. Most people don't know it exists in that tool, nor do most appreciate what a challenge that is. Markdown, as a writer's form of markup, has no format allowed for rendering images in any way other than to drop it between text paragraphs, most often presumed to fill the column width 100%. Word wrapping just isn't any part of the usual Markdown syntax or function. (Some 'flavors' of Markdown permit styles to be suffixed onto images, but that doesn't connect the plain-text editor to the rendered content in Markdown's usual writer-intuitive way.)

Since MDwiki uses Bootstrap for help in its browser formatting, it chooses to add an amazing feature: Wrap text to an image floated left or right, based on if the image(s) is(are) atop the paragraph (floating-left), or on the bottom (floating-right).

A good server candidate for Markdown is a project called "Up!", however this one little feature of formatting seems to have gone unnoticed.

Wanted:

I'd like Markdown projects to include MDwiki floats as a regular feature of their products. Up! really ought to include this, as it was inspired into existence by MDwiki. Flavors of Markdown such as MultiMarkDown (MMD), Github Flavored Markdown (GFM), Markdown Extra and all the others should embrace this as a simple syntax for a more powerful presentation.

Here's a link to the pertinent MDwiki article : http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!layout.md

The Javascript used by MDwiki to implement this feature is all in a single file of Dynalon's github repository called basic_skeleton.ts. It utilizes jQuery to group and tag the images. But servers like Up! and this domain based on HTMLy would need it refashioned in PHP.