About

In this context MDMA stands for "MarkDown Monolith Assembler". It is a command line tool for building elegant browser-based books using the Markdown markup language.

When given a markdown document as an input, this program produces a monolithic JavaScript-free HTML5 application as an output. For example, from this very readme file an HTML document would be generated that renders as shown in the below screenshot.

Screenshot depicting how this document renders in the Chromium web browser

To see a live demo of this document in the format of an HTML application, click on the above screenshot and the respective page will open in your web browser.

Usage

MDMA makes use of the standard input, output and error streams and follows the garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) principle by design. If the program is started with the -h (short for --help) argument, then it will only print its usage synopsis and exit.

In the following sections the usage synopsis is given, followed by the most common build instructions. Finally, libraries that need to be installed on the host system for successful compilation are listed.

Synopsis

Usage: mdma [OPTION]... [FILE]
General options:
      --brief         Print brief messages (default).
      --debug         Print debugging messages.
  -f  --framework     Use a custom HTML framework file.
  -h  --help          Display this usage information.
      --minify        Disable HTML indentation and wrapping.
      --monolith      Embed images and styles within the output.
  -o  --output        Specify the output file (standard output).
  -p  --preview       Set the image preview shrinking factor (8).
      --verbose       Print verbose messages.
  -v  --version       Show version information.

Markdown dialect options:
      --commonmark    Use the CommonMark syntax.
      --github        Use Github flavored markdown (default).

If the FILE argument is missing, the program will attempt to read a markdown document from its standard input.

Build Instructions

MDMA is written in C++ and should be trivial to compile on most Linux based systems. Just go to the src directory and type make. If compilation fails, then most likely you are missing some of the required dependencies listed in the following section.

Dependencies

In order to compile this program from its Makefile, the following libraries and their respective header files must be present in the system.

• md4c — C Markdown parser

• tinyxml2 — Simple XML parser made for easy integration

• tidy — A tool to tidy down HTML code to a clean style

• uriparser — Strictly RFC 3986 compliant URI parsing and handling library written in C89

• imlib2 — Library that does image file loading, saving and manipulation

• curl — Command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs

Showcase

Next, some of the projects that have put MarkDown Monolith Assembler into a good use are listed.

ErichErstu.net

License

MarkDown Monolith Assembler has been authored by Erich Erstu and is released under the MIT license.