Error: Terminal size 135x34 too small. Need at least 683x1242.

[c02y]

After installation, and mdp my_own.md, there are some long lines in my_own.md file,
it shows:"Error: Terminal size 135x34 too small. Need at least 683x1242.".
But my terminal is already in fullscreen mode, it should wrap long lines automatically to adjust the size of the terminal when in terminal presentation mode.

FYI: 1366x768 14 Inch Screen Laptop

Update:
I could have mentioned that the sample.md is totally fine in my terminal, maybe because the lines in the file are short, and I tried mdp for several other markdown files, all errors with the same message(different rows x columns of course).

As I said:"it should wrap long lines automatically to adjust the size of the terminal when in terminal presentation mode."

Platform: Fedora 20, 32-bit

[ghost]

what occured to me too. can someone solve this ?

[alahache]

+1

[visit1985]

What OS are you using? If the sample.md has the same issue, it is most likely a problem with the line break recognition.

[c02y]

@visit1985 I could have mentioned that the sample.md is totally fine in my terminal, maybe because the lines in the file are short, and I tried mdp for several markdown files, all errors with the same message(different size of course).

As I said:"it should wrap long lines automatically to adjust the size of the terminal when in terminal presentation mode."

Platform: Fedora 20, 32-bit

[drewsberry]

I too am getting this on Ubuntu 14.04, 32-bit. Basically, it's not wrapping any of the lines, meaning sample.md is fine as long as the terminal size is at least 44x18, whereas other markdown files with very long lines are literally impossible to display, because they need e.g. 733x18, which is unfeasible (a terminal stretching across both my screens takes up 360x21).

[edthedev]

For cases where the error message is valid, an additional line in the error output would be helpful:

"You may need to add additional slide breaks ('***') to the file, or shorten some lines to fewer columns."

[edthedev]

No issue with sample.md on Mac OSX 10.9.

But pointing mdp at other pre-existing .md files pretty much guarantees this message occurring; so we should try to make it as helpful as possible.

[visit1985]

The documentation is not very well until now. But as you can see in sample.md, pages (slides) are split by --- or ***, which is the markdown representaton of a horizontal ruler (HR) in HTML.

If you use existing markdown files. You need to ensure, that there are enough of these rulers in your file, so each slide fits in your terminal. As HR is not used very often in general, this may fail for existing markdown files without customization.

Another point is, that lines are too long. Line wrapping is not jet implemented. The main difficulty here is, that the terminal size is unknown when the file is parsed. Thus it is necessary to calculate the amount of lines per slide while displaying it which is a bit more difficult. But i'll try my best.

The extended error message is a good idea too. I'll add that.

For now, you need to reformat your existing markdown files to fit in your terminals lines/columns.

[edthedev]

The new error messages work great. Thanks!

[visit1985]

c6516c7 solves it partially I think. But we need some more logic for correct word division.

[matthiasbeyer]

Error: Terminal height (81 lines) too small. Need at least 579 lines.
You may need to add additional horizontal rules (---) to split your file in shorter slides.

With the sample.md from latest master.

[matthiasbeyer]

Forget what I've said. Was my fault.

[visit1985]

Just for reference: 4ebae8b

[oising]

Am I just missing the point completely or is the most sensible fix to just have vertical scrolling like a pager?

[JensKorte]

Would it be possible to extend the error message to something like:

Need at least 279 lines for slide #2 starting at line 31.
Old one:
Need at least 279 lines for slide #2.

[ersi-dnd]

I would like to complain about this the other way. The standard terminal size is 80 characters and 24 lines. The sample.md file needs 25 lines for slide number 7. I stripped the URL in the slide and then it fit perfectly.

Perhaps it is best that sample.md informs users about the standard terminal size and suggests they abide by it. Slides with other geometry could be permitted as an explicit option. Same for wrapping: out of the box 80 characters per line is the limit, while softwrapping is an option.

I think the current error messages and behaviour (exit with error) are okay, but perhaps there could be yet another option: Of the overreaching slides, display only as much as possible and truncate the rest. This is a slideshow program, it should most of all respect the slide markers and display as much as possible within those limits.

[ersi-dnd]

After some testing, I recommend using a hardwrapping text editor to write the source files. The recommended maximum wrapping point is at 76 characters. (It will cause issues with e.g. long URL's and that's yet another thing, in addition to line count, to be observed when composing the source.)

Hardwrapping the source text at 76 characters is recommended given the traditional standard terminal geometry: 80 characters and 24 lines. Wrapping at 76 characters leaves a small nice margin.

And it is also recommended to include this info in the sample.md file.

[iamtodor]

Have the same problem:

Error: Terminal height (50 lines) too small. Need at least 62 lines for slide #1.
You may need to add additional horizontal rules (---) to split your file in shorter slides.

MacOS 10.15.2
mdp 1.0.15
iterm 3.3.8

How to fix it properly?

[dessalines]

Getting this too.

[hopeseekr]

This is a completely stupid program.

This WONT_FIX bug for over 6 years, the maintainer needs to hold his head in shame!! I’m surprised such a glaring bug hasn’t damaged his hireability. If I viewed his GitHub repos, tried his #1 one (this one) and got this error and saw this bug report, I 100% would not hire him.

I ended up using mdr, which does exactly what I wanted.

npm install -g mdr

[jmdugan]

this is still an issue

[ubuntupunk]

bump

[tuxick]

How hard can it be to fix this?

[devnoot]

This is a completely stupid program.

This WONT_FIX bug for over 6 years, the maintainer needs to hold his head in shame!! I’m surprised such a glaring bug hasn’t damaged his hireability. If I viewed his GitHub repos, tried his #1 one (this one) and got this error and saw this bug report, I 100% would not hire him.

I ended up using mdr, which does exactly what I wanted.

npm install -g mdr

Bro it's open source and you're free to PR it.. It's annoying bug for sure but there's no reason to attack the developer

[action-server]

Same issue

[gpm1982]

I've experienced the same error myself, but was able to fix it by converting the line ending from Windows-style (CRLF) to Linux-style (LF) using dos2unix tool. Not sure if this is the case for all of you, but it is for me.

[gigaray]

fabulous program - very neat idea!

i started by copy and paste the sample.md with notepad++ and it continued working as I kept making changes to the .md file to suit my needs.

@gpm1982 - thank you

[orion486]

Based on a lot of the pseudo workarounds mentioned here, the problem seems to be that mdp requires markdown documents to be formatted specifically to comply with its own notion of slides? In other words, a slide inherits the height and width of the current terminal, and thus mdp expects all lines in the markup document to be wrapped to a value no greater than the current terminal's width and a slide height (delimited by ***) no greater than the terminal's height. This makes it problematic to use mdp as a general terminal markup-document viewer as its definition of slides for markup is not standard (at least as far as I can tell).

Thus, a pseudo-solution to use mdp as is, and as a general markdown document viewer for the terminal, would be to use the following command:

fold -s -w 80 document.md | sed '0~50 s/$/\n\*\*\*/g' | mdp

this will

• insert a linebreak every 80 chars or, if the line has spaces, at the last space within 80 char-length
• insert a slide-break (***) to denote the end of a slide, every 50 lines

This has some limitations though. If *** is inserted within the middle of a code-block in the markdown document, then mdp will ignore it and thus the slide will be seen as longer. A workaround to this would be writing a shell script that keeps track of code blocks, properly exits out of them, prints ***, and then re-enters code-block mode to continue on to the next slide.

Another limitation is that it will hard-split URL's that are longer than the specified width, and of course anything inside a code-block that might have not been intended to be seen as split (the fmt command wraps lines on white spaces but does not break long lines like URL's, but this would then break mdp). But for now I am happy with my one-liner bash command as it should be enough to display most markdown documents in an understandable way. But feel free to write your own shell script implementing your solution based on this command if you want, and do post it here for the benefit of others!