Graphics File Type Supported By Markdown

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Again, I’m asking here because of the accumulated Markdown experience - and because I consider Drafts a kind of reference implementation…

… What types of graphic should ![]() syntax support?

Obviously .PNG and .GIF and JPEG. But what else?

Today md2pptx supports these - well .PNG at least and probably JPEG.

It also converts SVG into .PNG under the covers - if you install CairoSVG.

I expect SVG is supported by Markdown and HTML.

But what about Encapsulated Postscript (EPS)? I doubt Markdown or HTML support it directly. It would imply an interpreter in every browser.

I could make md2pptx support EPS - and that would be a documented deviation from Markdown - if it were a deviation at all. I think it would be useful.

Today SVG support is done in md2pptx, as I say, by rendering to a bitmap - targeting a particular pair of dimensions. EPS support would do the same. This conversion is necessary as I don’t believe python-pptx can handle these file types explicitly.

(I’ve asked for better documentation of what graphics file types python-pptx supports.)

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When it is parsed to HTML, the HTML would be an IMG tag. Unfortunately that isn’t a one size fits all answer.

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Thanks. So EPS (and maybe some other exotic types) would have to be a documented deviation. It’s probably useful enough to do that.

As md2pptx is the one converting to .PNG I suppose I could teach it to optionally write out the .PNG. That would be a useful byproduct so that a real Markdown processor (and indeed HTML) could use the result. (mdpre could switch the filetype in generated Markdown to .PNG.)

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Markdown parsers couldn’t care less what you put in the markup. There may be exceptions, but there’s no validation going on, the Markdown parser pretty much just looks for ![a](b) and outputs an HTML img tag, like <img src="b" alt="a"/> for any values of a and b.

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Thank you. I might note that in my description. Along the lines of “it would be happily processed by a Markdown processor but would fail to render in a browser”.