Handle linebreaks in markdown

[Defman21]

Feature Request or Task

Feature request.

User Story / Description

I'm writing my articles in a code editor and line-break them manually at 80 chars, so I could read them anywhere without worrying about word-wrap and stuff. Markdown does not count these line-breaks as line-breaks and every markdown parser I saw join them automatically, so

Hello
world

becomes

Hello world

Dev.to, however, handle them as line-breaks.

Definition of Done

Hello
world

in a dev.to article renders as

Hello world

[jessleenyc]

One of the concerns here is that any changes we make to the way we handle markdown rendering needs to be backwards compatible. We could probably make this work by creating a configuration that authors can tweak on their own.

[glebec]

@jessleenyc another option would be to apply the change in parsing to only new articles (with an explicit note for all new articles that that is the case). I don't know that I like that idea, it feels like adding complexity and implicit behavior, but I figured it was worth noting as a possibility.

[stale]

Thanks for contributing to this issue. As it has been 90 days since the last activity, we are automatically closing the issue in 7 days. This is often because the request was already solved in some way and it just wasn't updated or it's no longer applicable. If this issue still requires attention, please respond with a comment. Happy Coding!

[dguo]

I have the same issue. I write posts with Vim (which I have set to automatically wrap lines at 80 characters) and add them to a repo for my personal website. I'd like to crosspost to dev.to, but this issue means I can't just copy and paste as is. I know Markdown is generally ambiguous, but I haven't encountered any other renderers with this behavior.

In the meantime, I'm using Vim to join lines together.

[jessleenyc]

Thanks for bringing this back up. Just created a new issue that should be a happy medium for everyone: #1492

[bwl21]

Github has a different behaviour for Issues and other places. I find this pretty strange and annoying.

see: https://github.community/t5/How-to-use-Git-and-GitHub/Why-does-markdown-in-issues-respect-line-breaks/m-p/18637

[alex-at-cascade]

Trying to publish my first article on dev.to, just ran into this and was completely confused! Will be happy when a fix is available.

[danihodovic]

Is this going to be addressed at some point in the near future? It's super annoying to have to modify every article that is cross-posted on dev.to

[cmgorton]

Because this seems to be stale and we are now talking about markdown configuration in general in #1492, I am going to go a head and close this issue. If you have more comments on line breaks and markdown please leave them in issue #1492. I will add that issue to a project board so it gets more visibility. Thanks.