MarkdownTools

MarkdownTools is a collection of command line utilities for processing Markdown text files. At the moment the collection includes only one utility: mdmerge. Over time additional utilities will be added to support Markdown workflows.

Current stable version is 1.0. See the Installation section below for guidance.

mdmerge

mdmerge is a command line utility that produces a single Markdown document by merging a set of Markdown documents. The merge can be accomplished by expanding include specifications found in the input files, by concatenating a list of files found in an index file, or both.

Synergy with Marked

Brett Terpstra's Marked 2 application is a GUI product that runs on OS X; it watches Markdown text files and displays the formatted output; it has extensive support for multi-file Markdown documents. Marked is my tool of choice for viewing formatted Markdown. I use it whenever I'm creating or reviewing Markdown content on my OS X machine. The invaluable multi-file document support in Marked is what drove me to create mdmerge.

mdmerge brings that same multi-file Markdown document processing to the command line. It is useful in any automated scripting environment where Markdown is processed. For example, I use it in automated build scripts (e.g., using gmake or Grunt) to produce documentation for the software I'm building. It is cross-platform; you can pre-process the Markdown files on any common OS that has a recent version of Python.

Markdown and include file syntax support

mdmerge has been tested with documents containing these Markdown syntax variants:

• classic (John Gruber's Markdown syntax)
• MultiMarkdown (Fletcher Penny's syntax, MultiMarkdown version 4)
• GHF (GitHub Flavored Markdown)

mdmerge accepts include declarations in these styles

• MultiMarkdown transclusion
• Marked file includes
• LeanPub code includes (as interpreted by Marked)
• LeanPub index files
• mmd_merge index files

Includes can be nested; that is, a file can include another file that itself include other files, and so on. Index (or book) files are only processed as such when they are the primary input; they cannot be nested -- but the files listed in the index file are treated as normal input files (expanding include specifications found within).

some examples

This example shows an include specification of another markdown file:

This next bit is an included Markdown file. If it also has embedded include specifications, they will be processed as well; these kinds of includes are nested.

<<[section-a.md]

End of example.

This example shows an include specification for source code:

This next bit is included source code. It is not examined for nested include specifications.

<<(example.c)

End of example.

This example shows a normal MultiMarkdown transclusion and a source code transclusion:

This demonstrates MultiMarkdown transclusions:

{{section-a.mmd}}

```C
{{example.c}}
```

End of example.

And of course there are raw file includes (<<{raw.html}) and index files. Read the documentation linked in the previous section or look at docs/specifications.mmd in the master branch.

Installation

Installation packages are available on PyPI. For Python 3 (3.3 or later) install the MarkdownTools; for Python 2 (2.6 or later) install the MarkdownTools2 package.

Install the package using pip, like this (in a Python 3 environment):

$ pip install MarkdownTools

or (in a Python 2 environment):

$ pip install MarkdownTools2

If you are upgrading an existing version, use pip install --upgrade.

You may need to use sudo if you are installing into the system's native Python environment.

Usage

The command line looks like this:

mdmerge [options] [-o outputfile] inputfile [inputFile ...]
mdmerge [options] [-o outputfile] -

Command arguments

options : One or more of --book, --export-target, -h, --help, --ignore-transclusions, --just-raw --leanpub, --version.

--book : Treat STDIN as an index file (a "book" file).

--export-target [html|latex|lyx|opml|rtf|odf] : Indicates the ultimate output target of the markdown processor, but primarily impacts wildcard substitution in Marked inclusion.

-h : Help information

--help : Same as -h.

--ignore-transclusions : Leave any MultiMarkdown transclusion specifications alone; do not include the specified file. Useful if you want to mix Marked/LeanPub includes and MultiMarkdown includes, but have MultiMarkdown handline the transclusions.

--just-raw : Ignore all include specifications except for raw includes; useful for processing the output of the Markdown processor to pick up the raw file include specifications that should have passed through untouched.

--leanpub : Indicates that any input file named book.txt should be treated as a LeanPub index file.

--version : Gives the version information about the utility.

-o outputfile : The filepath in which to store the merged text. If not specified, then STDOUT is used.

--outfile outputfile : same as -o.

- : The input comes from STDIN.

inputfile : A list of space separated input files that can be merged together. If multiple files are given, they are treated as if they were specified in a LeanPub index file.

Development

MarkdownTools are written in Python. The project repository contains python2/* branches that target Python 2 (2.6 and later) and python3/* branches that target Python 3 (3.3 and later). There are unit tests on each branch that can be executed using the runtests command script.

The master branch does not contain any source or tests; it contains the README file and a few other files that describe aspects of the project.

Testing

To run the tests:

$ ./runtests.sh

For Python 2 environments you will need to install the mock package (e.g., pip install mock).

Contributing

Similar to the contribution guidance from https://github.com/github/markup:

1. Fork it.
2. Create a branch (git checkout -b my_MarkdownTools)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am "Added Snarkdown")
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my_MarkdownTools)
5. Open a Pull Request
6. Enjoy a refreshing beverage and wait

Contributors should read the developer documentation, available in the docs directory of the master branch. To produce a nice pretty HTML version of those docs, install the doc tools (see the docs-support directory) and run the make-docs script in the docs directroy.

License and Copyright

MarkdownTools is licensed with the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.

Copyright 2014 Dave Hein