This was a comment I made on a “sink” post the mods deleted, and I think it’s an issue that needs addressing, so I’m pasting it here. The comment I replied to said something like “Superscript and spoilers have always worked fine in Sync”.

Ironically, that isn’t valid Lemmy markdown. Sync should be supporting Lemmy markdown, not Reddit markdown. Here’s what your comment looks like on the website:

This issuperscript and you can also dosubscript.

Source:

This is^superscript^ and you can also do~subscript~.

Here’s what it should look like:

Instead, you get this:

Personally I don’t like Lemmy’s syntax for spoilers, but Sync should still support it!

hidden or nsfw stuff

a bunch of spoilers here

Source:

::: spoiler hidden or nsfw stuff
a bunch of spoilers here
:::

I’m surprised that actually even works in Sync. It didn’t used to. However, Sync doesn’t show my code block accurately, which is funny as fuck! No app should be editing my code block. Sync is replacing my text with reddit markdown in order for it to display properly. And even when I put that markdown in a code block, it still converts it to reddit style! It also strips out the warning text!

Here is what I actually typed:

And here’s what Sync shows:

What a lazy ass way of doing it. It removes an important feature: the warning text, and won’t even let me show Sync users how to do a proper spoiler!

Oh, WTF. Sync butchered my comment when editing it! I had to fix it back on desktop.

Sync is not fine. It’s full of bugs that the dev is ignoring.

  • @redcalciumEnglish
    12•4 months ago

    Text formatting seems like a simple thing to fix, but it actually take a lot of effort to implement well.

    The thing about markdown library is every library supports slightly different markdown features. Lemmy uses markdown-it plus several extension (e.g. superscript and lowerscript, emoji, footnote, bidirectional text), which boasts 100% compatibility with the specs. Not sure what Sync uses, but as a native android app, it probably can’t use markdown-it and has to use one of many java/android markdown library, and none of them seems to claim 100% compatibility with the specs. I suspect other native android lemmy clients also have this problem. Even jerboa (made by a lemmy dev) is not immune to this problem too, simply because it uses a different markdown library (Markwon) that behaves differently than markdown-it.