Panda Docs

What's black and white and read all over?

This is a documentation build system that takes Markdown files as sources, and produces HTML files. It runs on Node.js, and uses Jade as its templating engine.

Features

• Markdown syntax using NAMP.
• Support for content references (conrefs) in Markdown
• Pass in individual files or entire directories; exclude files and directories with glob matching
• Embeddable metadata
• Easy template customization
• Automatic linking for all heading tags (h1, h2, e.t.c.), as well as automatic table of headers generation
• Provides a JSON format

Installation

Make sure you have a recent build of Node.js (this was tested on v0.6.0). Install it using npm:

npm install panda-docs -g

Want to try a demonstration? Then clone this repository, and run

node build.js

That'll turn this README into a better looking HTML file in the /out directory.

Usage

Use panda-docs in a script! Simply define a file similar to this one:

var options = {
    title: "Panda (from script)"
}
 
panda.make(["./src/"], options, function(err, cbReturn) {
    if (err) {
        console.error(err);
    }
});

You can find out more information on options you can use below:

Available Options

There are a number of arguments you can pass to Panda that affect the entire build. They are:

• -h, --help` Show this help message and exit.
• -v, --version Show program's version number and exit.
• -o PATH, --output PATH Resulting file(s) location [out]
• -oa PATH, --outputAssets PATH Resulting file(s) location for assets [out/assets]
• -tSTRING,--title STRING` Title of the index page [Panda: Default Title Here]
• --skin PATH The location of your Jade templates [./templates/default]
• --assets PATH The location of your asset files (CSS, Javascript, e.t.c.) [./templates/default/assets]
• -d, --disableTests Disables the test suite that runs at the end of an HTML build. This is NOT recommended.
• --keepFirstHeader If set, keeps the first header (<h1>) detected
• --baseUrl STRING Base url of all links [./]
• --keepOutDir Does not wipe output directory before building (defaults to false)
• --safeWords An array of words not to complain about when performing a spellcheck test

Jade Templates

You need at least one Jade template layout.jade. Optional you can have a template per file, for example if you have the file index.md you can add index.jade to your template folder and it will be used only for this file.

Within your Jade template, you have access to the following variables:

• content is the transformed HTML content of your Markdown file
• metadata is an object containing your document-based metadata values
• manifest is an object containing the Manifest.json properties
• toh is an object containing the headings for each file (h1, h2, e.t.c.). See below for more information on this object.
• headingTable is a function you can use to generate a list of your page's table of contents. See below for more information on using this
• fileName is the name of the resulting file (without the extension)
• title is the title of the documentation
• pageTitle is the title of the current page
• mtime indicates the last modified time of your source file
• markdown references the Markdown converter; since this is based on namp, you'll want to add .html at the end to get the actual HTML

All your passed in options are also available.

Working with a Table of Contents for a Page

The toh object has the following structure:

[{
    rank: 1,                   // the hierarchy in the toc (based on h1, h2, ..., h6)
    name: "My first header",   // the content of the header
    link: "#my-first-header",  // a direct internal url to be used
    line: 0                    // the line number in the original markdown file
    text: "# My first header"  // the actual Markdown header text
  }, {
    rank: 2,
    name: "Subtitle",
    link: "#subtitle",
    line: 4
  }, {
    rank: 4,
    name: "Minor Header",
    link: "#minor-header",
    line: 25
  },{
    rank: 2,
    name: "Another Subtitle!",
    link: "#another-subtitle",
    line: 58
}]

Each non-h1 header is also automatically an anchor. The resulting HTML for an H2 called "Testing Your Highlighter" looks like this:

<h2 id="testing-your-highlighter">
    <a class="heading_anchor" href="#testing-your-highlighter"></a>
    <i class="headerLinkIcon"></i>
    Testing Your Highlighter
</h2>

You can add an icon for headerLinkIcon to make it more discoverable, i.e. by using something from Font Awesome.

Finally, you also have access to a function, called headingTable, that automatically generates a table of contents for each page's heading. The resulting HTML produced by this function might look like this:

<ol class="tocContainer level_1">
    <li class="tocItem level_2">
        <a href="#defining-a-mode">Defining a Mode</a>
    </li>
    <li class="tocItem level_2">
        <a href="#defining-syntax-highlighting-rules">Defining Syntax Highlighting Rules</a>
        <ol class="tocContainer level_2">
            <li class="tocItem level_3">
                <a href="#defining-tokens">Defining Tokens</a>
            </li>
            <li class="tocItem level_3">
                <a href="#defining-regular-expressions">Defining Regular Expressions</a>
                <ol class="tocContainer level_3">
                    <li class="tocItem level_4">
                        <a href="#groupings">Groupings</a>
                    </li>
                </ol>
            </li>
        </ol>
    </li>
    <li class="tocItem level_2">
        <a href="#defining-states">Defining States</a>
    </li>
    <li class="tocItem level_2">
        <a href="#code-folding">Code Folding</a>
    </li>
</ol>

Basically, every sub-heading is nested underneath a parent heading of larger size. In the example above, we have a page with an <h2> tag called "Defining a Mode", followed by another <h2>, "Defining Syntax Highlighting Rules", which itself is followed by two <h3> tags, "Defining Tokens" and "Defining Regular Expressions." The last <h3> has an <h4> called "Groupings." We then go back to some regular old <h2> tags.

This generated table always ignores the <h1> tag. You can customize it by by embedding the following signature into your Jade template:

headingTable(toh, maxLevel, classes)

where

• toh is your page's toh object
• maxLevel is optional, and refers to the maximum heading number you want to display; this defaults to 4. Basically, any h tag greater than this number is ignored
• classes is optional, and it's an array of two strings. The first is a class that applies to all the <ol> tags; the second applies to the <li> tags. Every <ol> and <li> automatically gets a level_<POSITION> class that is set to the current item's position

Thus, to generate the above, your Jade template might go:

!= headingTable(toh, 5, ['tocContainer', 'tocItem'])

Callback Results

The callback for panda returns a JSON with one key: files, which is a listing of all the files generated. files is an array of objects, containing the following keys:

• filename: the filename (minus the suffix)
• mtime: the last modified time of your source file
• pageTitle: the title of the page (text only, meaning minus any # or <h1> indicators)

You could use this information to provide a list of Recently Updated content--which is exactly what the Cloud9 IDE User Documentation does.