Markdown Preview Server

A 🔥blazingly fast🔥 markdown preview server written in Rust

Project Goals

• Easy to extend
  Under the hood, the server uses the Rust port of the markdown-it library, which is made in a way where extensions to the base CommonMark spec can easily be created
• Fast
  Each render of the document should ideally be lower than 16.6ms, which is the time that a frame is shown on a 60Hz monitor.

Features

• CommonMark compliance. The server uses the markdown-it.rs library, which has full CommonMark compliance. Some additional features/blocks of the server may, however, replace some CommonMark blocks with versions that are not 100% compliant. There are plans to add a setting to disable these features
• LaTeX support. The server is able to translate LaTeX functions into MathML for rendering in the browser
• Syntax highlighting. The server is able to highlight code blocks using the syntect library
• Table of Contents. The server is able to generate a table of contents for the document using the [toc] block
• Custom CSS. The server can be configured to use a custom CSS file for styling the preview page

Installation

From Source

In order to build the server, run the following commands:

 # First, we build the front-end preview page
cd src_web
yarn
yarn build 
mv build ../assets/web_build

 # Then, compile the server
cd ..
cargo build --release

The final build will be in target/release/markdown-preview-server

Usage

markdown-preview-server is intended to run with an editor plugin. Currently, there is only a Neovim plugin currently available, but there are plans to make a VSCode/Codium plugin

$ markdown-preview-server --help
Usage: markdown-preview-server [OPTIONS]

Options:
      --css <PATH>             Path to user-defined CSS file [default: /etc/markdown-preview-server/style.default.css]
  -p, --port <PORT>            Port to listen on [default: 8080]
      --websocket-port <PORT>  [default: 8081]
  -h, --help                   Print help
  -V, --version                Print version