Murdoc

Murdoc is a lightweight publishing framework where you write in Markdown and can export to multiple formats. I wrote it primarily as a tool for writing technical documentation that I could then publish as a site and as a PDF.

The output can be styled but for this you'll need some expertise in HTML, CSS and LaTex.

Features

• Write everything in Kramdown, a superset of Markdown.
• Simple folder-based structure. Murdoc takes care of stitching everything together. Anyone familiar with daux.io should feel right at home.
• Wiki-style links based on kramdowns automatic generation of header IDs.
• Output to multiple formats:
  • static HTML using Jekyll
  • PDF (using LaTeX).
  • ePub support will be available in the near future.
• Templates: customize each output format by providing your own HTML, CSS or LaTeX code.
• Built-in webserver using express.
• Built-in folder watching using chokidar: any changes made to the documentation or the templates will automatically re-build the outputs.

Installation

Murdoc is available through npm.

npm install -g murdoc

Dependencies

Make sure the following tools are also installed:

• Jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com)
• Kramdown (http://kramdown.rubyforge.org)
• LaTeX: Murdoc uses the
  • On a Mac you will need to install MacTeX (http://tug.org/mactex/).
  • On Linux, you will need to install it from your distro's packages. You will also need to install some additional dependencies like graphicx, listings, inputenc.

Getting Started

Create a new Murdoc project and publish it to html.

murdoc --create --docs folder-name --watch --serve --output=html

Next direct your browser to http://localhost:4000 and you will see the Murdoc documentation. The next time you want to work on a project you can use:

murdoc --docs folder-name --watch --serve --output=html

In 'folder-name' you will now find three folders:

• docs: the content of your document. We've already put the documentation for Murdoc here, so you have a good example to start from.
• build: any build output is found here. The static sites end up in build/jekyll/_site. The PDF is written to build/latex/main.pdf.
• templates: When creating the project we copied in our default templates. Feel free to modify them to your needs, that's what they are there for.