How to write my own renderer?

[averms]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Is it simply a matter of copy pasting renderer.py and changing the functions? I imagine I would have to familiarize myself with the AST first.

I want to write a Vim help renderer and maybe also a Markdown renderer (#10).

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[chrisjsewell]

Hey @a-vrma yeh that would be cool thanks.

I guess the first place to look would be https://markdown-it-py.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using.html

In their words, markdown-it does not actually create an AST; it is a "token stream", i.e. it is not a tree, but a linear set of tokens like: [heading, open_paragraph, text, close_paragraph]

You can see what this looks like and how it works by going to https://markdown-it.github.io/ and clicking on the debug tab.

Apart from the built-in HTML render, the main implemented render is https://github.com/executablebooks/MyST-Parser/blob/master/myst_parser/docutils_renderer.py. This is relatively complex, but should give you some pointers.
Note, for this renderer, I created the markdown_it.token.nest_tokens function, which I required to turn the token stream in to more of an AST tree, and may be useful for other renderers.

so yeh have a look at those, then come back with questions 😄