Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data
by drasim on 4/18/2026, 3:24:39 PM
https://github.com/drasimwagan/mdv
Comments
by: kevinkoning
Markdown is a beautiful demonstration that document structure syntax can/should be simple. What most people do in Word is better done by just adjusting the document rendering/style, not the document structure...<p>I love the idea of extending markdown to include more visual elements, but if you're not careful you just reinvent HTML.<p>Here's my personal take on extending table syntax for charts. Easy to write, and if a renderer/parser understands the syntax you get a beautiful chart, and if it doesn't you get a table with slightly weird headings:<p><pre><code> | Month::x | Revenue::y1 | Cost::y2 | | -------- | ----------: | -------: | | Jan | $82,000 | $51,000 | | Feb | $91,000 | $56,000 | | Mar | $95,000 | $58,000 |</code></pre>
4/18/2026, 4:55:36 PM
by: amcaskill
I work on a dashboarding / BI solution that is also built around markdown and clickhouse. www.evidence.dev<p>We moved to stripe's Markdoc variant for the component syntax last year and have been really happy with it. Models are good at writing it, people are good at reviewing it.<p>Here's an area chart that would issue a SQL query for weekly revenue totals:<p>``` {% area_chart data="my_table" x="date" y="sum(revenue)" date_grain="week" /%} ```
4/18/2026, 5:50:38 PM
by: woodydesign
Very cool.<p>I’m a product designer, and I could totally see this fitting into my workflow for design briefs, strategy, review, and crit docs. Markdown is too simple, and Figma is too visual. This feels like a great middle ground.
4/18/2026, 6:21:43 PM
by: nzoschke
Looks cool.<p>I continue to love Markdown and always push it a bit further than Commonmark, with frontmatter, schemas, code fence metadata too.<p>I've been enjoying <a href="https://djot.net/" rel="nofollow">https://djot.net/</a> as a superset of Markdown that is feels very well designed and extensible too.<p>You may look into its syntax and tooling for prior art or some extra lift.<p>I'm trying to get a djot extension in Zed for syntax highlighting if anyone minds adding a to help signal some community interest.<p><a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/pull/5206" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/pull/5206</a>
4/18/2026, 6:00:31 PM
by: ifh-hn
I'm using quarto for this sort of thing.
4/18/2026, 6:17:34 PM
by: phyzix5761
Nice project. But at what point does Markdown just become Emacs Org-Mode? At least with Emacs you can write Lisp to make your document do anything you want.
4/18/2026, 5:29:23 PM
by: remywang
[dead]
4/18/2026, 5:51:23 PM