Support formatting in description

It would be nice to be able to add some basic formatting (perhaps using markdown) in the free-text fields of the nuspec file (summary, description and releaseNotes). Currently it’s hard to display the release notes properly.

See also this issue on CodePlex: https://nuget.codeplex.com/workitem/937

[anangaur]

@ederbond We need to support older clients that do not understand markdown and we cannot go back in time to fix this for those clients. An alternative solution that we think works is to support “Documentation” for packages that can take markdown text. The solution has following parts:

1. Ability to associate a markdown documentation to packages (and existing packages)
2. Understand markdown and render it properly on NuGet.org package details page
3. Ability to associate markdown documentation content while packing the package from clients
4. Ability on VS client to show this markdown content.

While we are done with 1 and 2 as part of 2017 Interns project, we are yet to get started on 3 and 4. We did not want to wait for all 4 parts to complete before rolling out the feature. We have released the work we did so far for people who want to try it out (the current experience may not be an ideal one) and provide us feedback to improve the experience further.

We would love to hear further comments and feedback on the feature and accordingly we will proceed for 3 and 4.

[skofman1]

Update on this topic: We are starting work on allowing to upload markdown documentation as part of the package: https://github.com/NuGet/Home/wiki/Packaging-Documentation-within-the-nupkg

The discussion issue for this feature is here: https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/6873 Closing this one as duplicate.