Ravi S. Iyer: Software Development

Temporarily Hiding Comments in VS Code Editor Date: 29 June 2026 Section Contents VS Code Built-In Fold and Unfold Comments Features VS Code Hide Comments Extension Converting Line Comments to Block Comments VS Code folding: Article(s) and Official Documentation VS Code Built-In Fold and Unfold Comments Features VS Code built-in feature to collapse multi-line block (/* ... */) comments out of sight. However, when I tried it, it collapsed only some sets of contiguous // comments. Command: Fold All Comments -> Ctrl + K then Ctrl + / First time, I tried above keyboard shortcut it did not work. The command thru command palette worked. Later the keyboard shortcut also worked. Command: UnFold All -> Ctrl + K then Ctrl + J First time, I tried it via command palette, it gave some error related to 'Pylance: Unfold All Docstrings'. Looks like when I typed Unfold All, that command got selected which seems to be different from standard Unfold All. T...

Recently for Election Commission of India SIR enrollment, I had to search in its 2002 E-Roll PDFs. It was quite impressive to see the search facility and the PDF outputs given the huge scale of the data it has to handle. In this context, I ran into an issue of copy-pasting Devanagari text from a PDF which rendered the Devanagari font correctly, into a text file being edited by Notepad++. The copy-paste of the key line about what seems to be my entry, in Notepad++ gave (English numbers changed to hide key data but rendering of English numbers was OK in Notepad++): 999 ŸÖãeúÖ¸üÖ´ÖË +ªªÉ®ú ®ú´ÉÒ BºÉ. ´É +ªªÉ®ú BºÉ. {ÉÖ 99 Gemini AI tool did a great job in giving me the right Devanagari text in Unicode which matches what the PDF rendered: 999 | तुकाराम | अय्यर रवी एस. | व | अय्यर एस. | पु |  | 99 This led to an exchange with Gemini on why this issue was happening and ways to convert the old data correctly without Gemini AI tool's help. After I used Foxit Reader to inspect fonts in the ...

Last updated on 30 June 2026 https://markdowntohtml.com/ which I use regularly seems to trip up on quite a few markdown code segments which Chrome markdown extension handles well. So I am considering some alternate markdown to HTML converters. "Markdown All in One: Print current document to HTML" VS Code extension command creates or overwrites (without warning) an html document with same base name. In one small test case, it did quite a good job. https://stackedit.io/  - Can copy-paste markdown code in left pane (is not so obvious that you can do so), To export as HTML (with plain HTML template), the StackEdit logo (has ‘#’ in it) Toggle sidebar button has to be clicked to reveal the import/export menu commands. https://dillinger.io/  - Has an Export as HTML button https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/ - Seems good but may trip up on enhanced markup. Gem: “CommonMark is a strict, standardized specification of base Markdown. It will absolutely trip up on enhanced mar...

Last updated on 26 June 2026 Post series: Part 1 ,     Prev Part (15) ,     Post Series TOC Contents (sections and/or jump links) Stage-8: Polishing tutorial chat app and creating support documentation In setupWebPush ask for notification permission only if not already granted About page: Intro About page as blog post - external link - will not get offline-cached About Page: (Discussion only) Fetching HTML from Blogger blog post using fetch will hit CORS problem About Page: (Discussion only) Fetching HTML from GitHub Pages static JSON site will not encounter CORS problem About Page solution that works with offline cache: MPA with About opened in new window and having external link to Details section in blog post Vite npm run preview is SPA server; Vite build config has to include about.html Companion blog post having details like procedure for testing app features PWA app opens About page like a modal Cond...