With built-in syntax support, it would be possible to render the blocks/spans before it hits the preview UI, eliminating performance and volume overhead, even Internet connection! Very excited about what we can do in the future. MacDown now uses MathJax to render math in the preview, but this requires Internet connection (because MathJax is huge), and is not exactly efficient (because we need to re-render every time preview is updated, and MathJax isn’t very fast either). Many bugs are killed just because of that.īuilt-in math syntax also opens the door to a new possibility: server-side math rendering. Hoedown 3 added built-in math blocks/spans detection, so now math syntax gets first-class support. LaTeX-like math syntax support has always been a popular feature for MacDown (and many other Markdown editors, too!), but unfortunately due to syntax differences between Markdown and LaTeX, the support is not without problems. The most important feature change in MacDown 0.3 is… Math Rendering Great thanks to the people behind Hoedown!īut those are not all we get from a simple library upgrade. The library API has been revamped greatly, and while you might not be able to notice the difference (without digging into the source code), this helps the development of MacDown because we can now build extensions to the rendering system more easily.

As a result, MacDown now outputs the preview HTML more quickly than ever before, with even fewer glitches. The Markdown-to-HTML rendering backend has been upgraded to Hoedown 3. This is the second minor version jump in a row, and with good reason: it is much better than MacDown 0.3.

Macdown greek