Don't modify original markdown document style by default

[danielwerg]

So far in my testings I had to use --link-format keep --no-br just to preserve original markdown style. I feel those flags should be default behavior, I didn't expect mdq to modify parts of markdown that I'm not working with.

[danielwerg]

Also this: #413 (comment)

[yshavit]

--link-format keep could definitely be done. I think an .mdqrc would probably be best, so that people could come up with their own preferences.

The line break issue is harder. mdq does a lot of normalization behind the scenes, so by the time it renders the result, a lot of information like line breaks has been lost. It sounds like you don't use line breaks in your markdown, so --no-br gives you back something closer to your original; but if someone else did have markdown in their original, --no-br would be the thing that changes, not preserves, the format. :-\

An .mdqrc would help with this, too!

[danielwerg]

My bad I had --no-br for example in #413 and then it transformed to "don't add extra breaks" in my mind. Original problem I had that lead me to find this project was that I wanted to delete "## Delete me" header and all of it "children":

# Title

## Blah

blah blah blah

## Delete me

And me

### Also get rid of me

all of this should be gone

## Blah

blah blah blah

To get this:

# Title

## Blah

blah blah blah

## Blah

blah blah blah

And preserve rest of the document 1 to 1. I don't want to add or remove line breaks or anything similar. Although you might noticed that I removed extra new line in my desired result (assuming we don't count this extra new line as a part the heading).

mdq does a lot of normalization behind the scenes

Sounds like it is not a tool I want then. In case of jq I wouldn't care if it would normalize my json but with markdown document it's different since it has artistic value to me.

[yshavit]

Ah, yeah, sorry -- mdq was designed primarily to extract information, not to modify documents. In other words, it's more like jq than awk/sed.

That's not to say it couldn't ever be what you were hoping for, but unfortunately it would take a non-trivial amount of surgery on the code (to pass around the original formatting information).