One of the most annoying features of Markdown for me is the fact that newlines within a paragraph are automatically joined, which is one of the reasons why I like Github Flavored Markdown so much.

Ever since I setup my Octopress blog, I’ve wanted to use it with GFM. I searched around the web and found how to switch the markdown processor for Jekyll. I came across this post with instructions on switching to Maruku, which extends Markdown with the ability to create tables, footnotes, custom header ids, etc. I gave it a shot, but quickly realized that there’s no option to enable hard warp linebreaks. Back to searching.

I then came across this post on Stackoverflow that compared Maruku, BlueCloth, and RDiscount, none of which offered what I wanted. However, I discovered RedCarpet, the open source Markdown processor tha Github uses to render Markdown and GFM pages. Seems like exactly what I was looking for.

Maybe it’s because my Google-Fu is not up to par, but I could not find any instructions on using RedCarpet with Octopress. It turned out that I was just not looking for the correct terms. I found a Stackoverflow answer on how to configure Jekyll with RedCarpet. Perfect!

Below are the instructions for getting Octopress to render Github Flavored Markdown using RedCarpet.

1. add gem 'redcarpet', '~> 2.1.1' to Gemfile in the Octopress directory
2. run bundle install --no-deployment to install RedCarpet
3. Install @nono’s RedCarpet Jekyll Plugin by saving it as redcarpet2_markdown.rb in the plugins folder

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require 'fileutils'
require 'digest/md5'
require 'redcarpet'
require 'albino'

PYGMENTS_CACHE_DIR = File.expand_path('../../_cache', __FILE__)
FileUtils.mkdir_p(PYGMENTS_CACHE_DIR)

class Redcarpet2Markdown < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
  def block_code(code, lang)
    lang = lang || "text"
    path = File.join(PYGMENTS_CACHE_DIR, "#{lang}-#{Digest::MD5.hexdigest code}.html")
    cache(path) do
      colorized = Albino.colorize(code, lang)
      add_code_tags(colorized, lang)
    end
  end

  def add_code_tags(code, lang)
    code.sub(/<pre>/, "<pre><code class=\"#{lang}\">").
         sub(/<\/pre>/, "</code></pre>")
  end

  def cache(path)
    if File.exist?(path)
      File.read(path)
    else
      content = yield
      File.open(path, 'w') {|f| f.print(content) }
      content
    end
  end
end

class Jekyll::MarkdownConverter
  def extensions
    Hash[ *@config['redcarpet']['extensions'].map {|e| [e.to_sym, true] }.flatten ]
  end

  def markdown
    @markdown ||= Redcarpet::Markdown.new(Redcarpet2Markdown.new(extensions), extensions)
  end

  def convert(content)
    return super unless @config['markdown'] == 'redcarpet2'
    markdown.render(content)
  end
end

1. Replace markdown: rdiscount in _config.yml with the following

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   markdown: redcarpet2 redcarpet: extensions: ["hard_wrap"]

That should be it! Now the lines should be hard wrapped. I also have a few other extensions turned on. Below is my extension settings:

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extensions: ["hard_wrap", "no_intra_emphasis", "fenced_code_blocks", "autolink", "tables", "with_toc_data", "strikethrough", "superscript"]

• no_intra_emphasis: Multiple_underscores_in_words => Multiple_underscores_in_words
• fenced_code_blocks: Don’t need to indent to embed code
• autolink: URL autolinking => http://google.com test@email.com
• tables: allow tables
• with_toc_data: add HTML anchors to each header
• strikethrough: ~~strikethrough text~~ => ~~strikethrough text~~
• superscript: normaltext ^(superscript) => normaltext ^(superscript)

More options are described in RedCarpet’s Documentation.