title	date	aliases
About	2018-07-22 14:05:51 +0100	/about/

Mmark is a powerful markdown processor written in Go, geared towards writing IETF documents. It is, however, also suited for writing complete books and other technical documentation, like the Learning Go book (mmark source, and I-D text output.

It provides an advanced markdown dialect that processes file(s) to produce internet-drafts in XML RFC 7991 format. Mmark can produce xml2rfc (aforementioned RFC 7991), RFC 7749 (xml2rfc version 2) and HTML5 output.

Example RFCs in Mmark format can be found in the Github repository.

Mmark uses gomarkdown which is a fork of blackfriday.

If you like Go and parsing text, drop me (mailto:[email protected]) a line if you want to be part of the Mmarkdown Github org, and help develop Mmark!

Syntax

Mmark's syntax and the extra features compared to plain Markdown are detailed in syntax.md.

Mmark adds the following syntax elements to gomarkdown/markdown:

• (Extended) title block.
• Special sections.
• Including other files with the option to specify line ranges, regular expressions and/or prefix each line with a string. By default only files on the same level, or below are allowed to be included (see the -unsafe flag).
• Document divisions.
• Captions for code, tables and quotes
• Asides.
• Figures and Subfigures - bundle (sub)figures into a larger figure.
• Block Level Attributes that allow to specify attributes, classes and IDs for elements.
• Indices to mark an item (and/or a subitem) to be referenced in the document index.
• Citations and adding XML References
• In document cross references, short form of referencing a section in the document.
• Super- and Subscript.
• Callouts in code and text.
• BCP14 (RFC 2119) keyword detection.

Usage

You can download a binary or optionally build mmark your self. You'll need a working Go environment, then check out the code and:

% go get && go build
% ./mmark -version
2.0.0

To output XML2RFC v3 xml just give it a markdown file and:

% ./mmark rfc/3514.md

Making a draft in text form (v3 output)

% ./mmark rfc/3514.md > x.xml
% xml2rfc --v3 --text x.xml

Making a draft in text form (v2 output)

% ./mmark -2 rfc/3514.md > x.xml
% xml2rfc --text x.xml

Outputting HTML5 is done with the -html switch. Outputting RFC 7749 is done with -2. And outputting markdown is done with the -markdown switch (optionally you can use -width to set the text width).

Example RFC

The rfc/ directory contains a couple of example RFCs that can be build via the v2 or v3 tool chain. The build the text files, just run:

cd rfc
make txt

For v2 (i.e. the current (2018) way of making RFC), just run:

cd rfc
make TWO="yes" txt

Official RFCs are in rfc/orig (so you can compare the text output from mmark).

Using Mmark as a library

By default Mmark gives you a binary you can run, if you want to include the parser and renderers in your own code you'll have to lift some of it out of mmark.go.

Create a parser with the correct options and flags. The that init is used to track file includes. In this snippet we set if to fileName which is the file we're currently reading. If reading from standard input, this can be set to "".

p := parser.NewWithExtensions(mparser.Extensions)
init := mparser.NewInitial(fileName)
documentTitle := "" // hack to get document title from TOML title block and then set it here.
p.Opts = parser.Options{
    ParserHook: func(data []byte) (ast.Node, []byte, int) {
        node, data, consumed := mparser.Hook(data)
        if t, ok := node.(*mast.Title); ok {
            if !t.IsTriggerDash() {
                documentTitle = t.TitleData.Title
            }
        }
        return node, data, consumed
    },
    ReadIncludeFn: init.ReadInclude,
    Flags:         parserFlags,
}

Then parser the document (d is a []byte containing the document text):

doc := markdown.Parse(d, p)
mparser.AddBibliography(doc)
mparser.AddIndex(doc)

After this doc is ready to be rendered. Create a renderer, with a bunch of options.

opts := html.RendererOptions{
    Comments:       [][]byte{[]byte("//"), []byte("#")}, // used for callouts.
	RenderNodeHook: mhtml.RenderHook,
	Flags:          html.CommonFlags | html.FootnoteNoHRTag | html.FootnoteReturnLinks| html.CompletePage,
	Generator:      `  <meta name="GENERATOR" content="github.com/mmarkdown/mmark Mmark Markdown Processor - mmark.nl`,
}
opts.Title = documentTitle // hack to add-in discovered title

renderer := html.NewRenderer(opts)

Next we we only need to generate the HTML: x := markdown.Render(doc, renderer). Now x contains a []byte with the HTML.