mmark

README

---

title: "About" date: 2018-07-22T14:05:51+01:00 aliases: [/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).

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 7941 (xml2rfc version 2) and HTML5 output.

Example RFCs 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:miek@miek.nl) 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/black friday:

• (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.
• Document divisions.
• Captions for code, tables and quotes
• Asides.
• Figures and Subfigures - this syntax is still under consideration as is "do we really need this?"
• 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 (TODO)
• Callouts in code and text.
• BCP14 (RFC 2119) keyword detection.

Usage

To build mmark you need to working Go environment, then check out the code and:

% 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:

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

Outputting HTML5 is done with the -html switch. Outputting RFC 7741 is done with -xml2.

TODO

• xml2rfc v2 (RFC 7741) output as a first class citizen.
• LaTeX output?