[QUESTION] How to override markdown header justification?

[philwareublox]

Hello,
Can I override the classes inside the markdown module?
I'd like to change the Heading class, specifically I'd like to override the text.justify = "center" in the markdown Heading class.
How can I do this?

Many thanks,
Phil.

[willmcgugan]

It's not documented, but the Markdown class is easy to extend. There is a classvar called elements, which maps a markdown block on a class. You can use this to replace the Heading class with your own custom version.

[github-actions]

Did I solve your problem?

Why not buy the devs a coffee to say thanks?

[philwareublox]

Thanks for the tip.
I simply created a new class myHeader(TextElement): with my own style and replaced the default one by:

Markdown.elements['heading'] = myHeading

[ssbarnea]

To be honest, I do find the default decision to center bit weird as almost everyone working with markdown does not do centered titles. Look at Google Docs, Git markdown, all of them indent to left, even on generic webpage documents title is not centered by default and most authors do not opt-in for picking centered. There are reasons related to readability that made most switch to this, as 100 years ago centering was standard.

When it comes to terminal, centering is even more damaging to readability, so how about considering now centering by default? WDYT? How about opening a poll on discussions about the subject?

[willmcgugan]

Headers are typically rendered larger than the body text in HTML. You can't do that in the terminal. If headers were all aligned to the left they would be indistinguishable from body text, even with bold / underline.

Centered headings are perfectly readable.

[hek2mgl]

I'm using python -m rich.markdown in a shell script. When possible, I would like to avoid extending the Python class and keep using the vanilla version of rich.

The result looks great! I only admit that I'm also thinking that the centered headlines are breaking the flow of text a bit for me.

@willmcgugan you made a good point that there is no option to render the headers larger than the body at the terminal and therefore the options are somewhat limited. This makes sense! I still gave it a try, and and for my current use case, <=3 level of hierarchy, justify = "left" for the headers looks good.

[jluna]

Centered headings are perfectly readable.

@willmcgugan For what it's worth, here's an example of centered headers that make the content much less readable.

[willmcgugan]

Have a look at markdown.py, and change it how you see fit.