Allow markdown formating in "Description"

[stranak]

Allow at least emphasis and code via ** and ``

[stranak]

See for instance this record that tries to use such formating: http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-5672

[kosarko]

What I'm thinking: We should be careful with that, when we officially support this shouldn't we somewhere express the different semantic, eg. by specifying text/markdown (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763). Should we drop the formatting in (oai-pmh) exports?

[stranak]

Hmm, those are good points. Especially the exports are something to worry about. If we supported e.g. tables in markdown, it could break into a complete garbage when formating is removed. We certainly do not want that.

Are there some precedents, or is metadata always and everywhere (by definition) plain text?

[kosarko]

apparently zenodo allows markdown, but what do they do in exports?

[stranak]

An example of Zenodo record that shows text with links and a paragraph in bold. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10848331

[stranak]

I just used HTML markup (

and
) in the Description of http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-5982, it is working. Maybe we can document it in the hint in the submission workflow, while we are deciding about Markdown?

[kosarko]

Something seems to be provided in vanilla: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/blob/dspace-7_x/src/config/default-app-config.ts#L419 . Need to investigate

[kuchtiak-ufal]

After some investigation I found that

1. The MarkdownConfig property is set to false:

MarkdownConfig = {
    enabled: false,
    mathjax: false,
  };

That means the Markdown is not enabled neither for https://commonmark.org/ nor for https://www.mathjax.org/

2. Even when we enable Markdown in the MarkdownConfig we will only allow to render Markdown format for the dc.description.abstract metadata value, particularly for:
   <ds-item-page-abstract-field> component

As, for the dc.description metadata, Clarin uses the
<ds-clarin-description-item-field> component

which doesn't allow rendering text in markdown format.

Solution.

Update the <ds-clarin-description-item-field> component to render properly the Markdown formatted text, based on the MarkdownConfig definition.

[kuchtiak-ufal]

Markdown implemented for the description metadata value.

PR: ufal/dspace-angular#56

[kuchtiak-ufal]

Seems to me that set generally the markdown config to

  MarkdownConfig = {
    enabled: true,
    mathjax: true|false
  };

may cause some issues:

• the existing item descriptions didn't expect markdown rendering is running
  (this may potentially cause some issues)
• item descriptions are not only used in Item view page, but also in the Home page where the list of latest items are displayed, and the raw text (not rendered text) looks ugly. See the picture

This is description is properly rendered in item view page:

Suggestion.

For user who wants to submit the Markdown formatted description, there should be an option (e.g. the checkbox) in the submission page providing the information that description is written in Markdown format.
The information can be stored in local.description.markdown boolean metadata property.

Thus, it's up to user to use markdown format in description (not generally set), and the markdown formatted text will not be shown in the Home page. Instead, there will be Preview link/button allowing user to see the Markdown text:

Sample:

[kuchtiak-ufal]

So the remaining tasks are:

• add new (boolean) metadata property: local.description.markdown (backend)

All the other tasks are for Frontend:

• create the "Allow Markdown"checkbox (beside the description field in Subscription form
• Item View: render the dc.description metadata based on the 'local.description.markdown' property value:
  • when local.description.markdown = true -> render the description text using MarkdownPipe, otherwise show the description text normally (as before)
• Home Page
  • when local.description.markdown = true -> add the Preview button and implement a modal dialog window showing the rendered description text, otherwise show the description normally (as before)