Notes

We decided to not follow the usual meeting structure and instead only discussed how to refactor the Subplot code base.

We’ve reached a stage where the next thing to do is to replace the Pandoc (or pandoc_ast) representation of a parsed Markdown document with one of our own. We don’t like the Pandoc one for the things we want to do, and would prefer a more malleable one. In addition, the Pandoc one has changed in incompatible ways before, making it harder for us to use it.

We discussed what we want from such a representation and came up with a plan. For this iteration:

• Daniel will refactor the Document methods to avoid requiring a mutable reference to self, when possible.
• Lars will refactor Document to drop the markdowns fields and the Document::sources method to get the information from the document metadata instead.
• Lars will change Subplot to drop direct support for generating PDF. We decided that for now, we only care about HTML output. We may add PDF support back later, but it’ll be easier to not need have that while we are redoing document parsing. In any case, we’ve verified that producing a reasonable PDF with Pandoc from the HTML output is feasible.
• Lars will drop pandoc_ast as a dependency in favor of pulldown_cmark, and a custom representation of a parsed Markdown document. Lars will probably use a lightweight abstraction for HTML, and rewrite the pandoc_ast::MutVisitor use to query that instead.
• Lars will drop the Markdown::set_metatdata method and instead give the YamlMetadata directly to Markdown::to_json. From the caller’s point of view, there’s no need to have two methods for this. Or possibly Lars will just drop both methods, if they’re not needed for HTML generation.

Meeting participants

• Daniel Silverstone
• Lars Wirzenius