API documentation is missing an explanation of CMARK_NODE_CUSTOM_BLOCK and CMARK_NODE_CUSTOM_INLINE
arranstewart opened this issue · 2 comments
The API documentation for cmark (e.g. in the cmark.3 man page) does not explain the
purpose or proper use of the CMARK_NODE_CUSTOM_BLOCK
and CMARK_NODE_HTML_INLINE
constants from the cmark_node_type
enum. (Actually, it does not explain the purpose or use of any of the cmark_node_type
constants; but all the others correspond fairly obviously to blocks or inlines in the CommonMark spec.)
I see that the changelog contains some description of them:
- [API change] Added
CUSTOM_BLOCK
andCUSTOM_INLINE
node types.
They are never generated by the parser, and do not correspond
to CommonMark elements. They are designed to be inserted by
filters that postprocess the AST. For example, a filter might
convert specially marked code blocks to svg diagrams in HTML
and tikz diagrams in LaTeX, passing these through to the renderer
as aCUSTOM_BLOCK
. These nodes can have children, but they
also have literal text to be printed by the renderer "on enter"
and "on exit." Addedcmark_node_get_on_enter
,
cmark_node_set_on_enter
,cmark_node_get_on_exit
,
cmark_node_set_on_exit
to API.
But that information really should be in the API documentation, not in the changelog - without it, the API documentation cannot be understood. And because the changelog uses the abbreviation CUSTOM_BLOCK
instead of spelling out CMARK_NODE_CUSTOM_BLOCK
in full, searching for CMARK_NODE_CUSTOM_BLOCK
in the repository will never bring up that changelog entry, making it difficult for developers to work out what it was intended to do.
If the man page is the only place that would need updating, then I'd be happy to create a PR to add the changelog information to the man page, if desired.
Agreed, this should be in the docs.
Note that the man page is autogenerated from comments in the source (see the cmark.3 target in the Makefile). So you'd need to add comments to the source (cmark.h
).
No worries - yes, I just now saw the make_man_page.py
script as I was poking around. I'll let you know once I've got something. Cheers!