“Wiki code” live preview

Hi all,

I’m doing some work for a company that uses what it describes as “wiki code” or “wiki formatting tags” for formatting.

It uses tables quite often, and these are formatted by using || before each header in the first row, then a | before each cell in subsequent rows. For example:

||Header 1||Header 2
|A1|B1
|A2|B2

It also uses !/!/!!! for headers, two underscores on each end for bold text, and apostrophes on either side of the text for italics. There are various others but these are the main ones I expect to use.

The work (basically, questions to answer) I get is all in text format and because they often use tables they can be hard to read. I wonder whether anyone knows of any sort of Markdown-style live-previewer that might interpret these tags (mainly the tables) and render them correctly so I can read the information more easily? If not I think I should be able to throw together a Shortcut to do it, but it would good to have something live because I also have to write answers to these questions which may include tables—and it would be nice to be able to see what I am doing. :slight_smile:

(I could try actually coding some sort of web app or something, too, of course, which might be a worthy project for learning purposes, but if something already exists that would obviously be easier…)

Well, if you do a find and replace of || with |, theoretically pasting the tables into numbers should either auto detect the pipe as a separator, or if not let you choose it from a list. I’m sure you can hack this not quite markdown to markdown, but if you can find out which wiki they’re using maybe a local install and pasting would be fastest with the best results.

Tableflip? macOS but it’s made for working with Markdown tables quickly.

If you have an existing set-up for working with another format (e.g. Markdown with a live preview - e.g. in app or using Marked on Mac), then perhaps consider working in that as your master copy and then generating the specific wiki syntax from that.

Much of the Markdown use as a base format is based around doing exactly that. You start with your basic Markdown content and then run it through a converter to produce your HTML, PDF, Word document, slide deck, etc.

If you started with say multi-markdown or another flavour supporting tables that it should then mainly be a case of a set of find and replace, perhaps with some careful use of regular expressions?

Thanks all. I think in the end I will create a shortcut to quickly show the existing info in a table, possibly sharing into Evernote since that seems to work in some quick testing.

Generating new tables is not so bad since they are usually quite basic and I will know what I have done—the site I am working on does have a preview function—though I think I will be working in some other text editor because the site itself is pretty ugly and only leaves a small space to actually work in—it will be fine for a last-minute check to make sure everything is okay. :slight_smile: