Ma_Sys.ma D5Man 2

Overview

Ma_Sys.ma D5Man 2 is a set of programs and auxiliary resources intended to build a locally run knowledge base. It consists of the following individual components:

d5mantui

Terminal User Interface as an interactive means to query for D5Man pages. See d5mantui for details.

d5manexport

Multiple programs to export a special instance of pandoc’s Markdown by invoking the pandoc utility (not part of D5Man). Two export scripts are supplied: d5manexportpdf exports a single page to a printable PDF document; d5manexporthtml exports a whole directory structure of D5Man pages to a specified directory.

Auxiliary Resources

The package provides a syntax file markdown.vim as a replacement for VIM’s default Markdown style. This style makes sections more visible and is loosely inspired by the style used in D5Man Legacy.

This version “D5Man 2” replaces D5Man Legacy which was an attempt to achieve a similar outcome but in a much more sophisticated manner leading to excessive complexity.

D5Man Structure and Concepts

D5Man is centered around the concept of D5Man pages: A D5Man page is a text file written in a subset of pandoc’s Markdown together with a minimum amount of metadata in YAML format and with optional attachment files. The details of the format are described under D5Man Format 2.

Filesystem Structure

Two ways of organizing D5Man pages on file systems are recommended:

1. Document-Root: A directory structure which consists only of D5Man pages (or other data processable by the D5Man API Server). On the top-level there is one directory per section and the respective sections contain one ore multiple D5Man documents each.
2. Program-Root: A directory structure which consists of programs’ repositories. Here, pages are represented by the files named README.md in the subdirectories of the root.

A third option is detached, that is a directory unknown to the D5Man programs which contains one or more pages. Such files are not found by the D5Man API Server but can still be converted to PDF.

Example for a Document-Root Structure: Ma_Sys.ma Website

/rr
 |
 +-- 31/
 |    |
 |    +-- web_about_att/
 |    |    |
 |    |    +-- ...
 |    |
 |    +-- web_news_att/
 |    |    |
 |    |    +-- ...
 |    |
 |    +-- ...
 |    |
 |    +-- web_about.md
 |    |
 |    +-- web_news.md
 |    |
 |    +-- ...
 |
 +-- ...

Example for a Program-Root Structure: Ma_Sys.ma Repositories

/rr
 |
 +-- bo-adler32/
 |    |
 |    +-- README.md
 |    |
 |    +-- ...
 |
 +-- bo-big/
 |    |
 |    +-- big4_att/
 |    |    |
 |    |    +-- screenshot3.png
 |    |
 |    +-- README.md
 |    |
 |    +-- ...
 |
 +-- ...

Concept

D5Man is designed as a sort of personal Wiki that can have a published part. To achieve the separation between published and private parts, different sections are used. Each page is assigned a section, which by convention is a number of two digits (i.e. ranges from 10 to 99).

• Pages are created, edited and viewed in a text editor which is by default configured to be VIM.
• If ready for the Internet, pages are exported to XHTML and can then be uploaded to any webspace. Alternatively, if pages are to be printed, they can be exported to PDF. All export uses Pandoc internally.
• The D5Man User Interface runs in a terminal emulator. This way, all interactive parts are available from the commandline. Additionally, for “browsing” large pieces of information (like e.g. an API documentation), a web-based interface is desirable. Thus there is also a read-only web-based interface for exactly that purpose called IAL (Information and Links) as a separate program, see ial(32).

A typical workflow for creating a page is as follows:

1. Create an empty page by copying from a template file (d5man2.md) to a file in a section directory or repository’s README.md.
2. Populate the file with information.
3. Optionally: Export the file to target format of choice and print it or upload it to the Internet.

To edit or recall a page, enter a prefix of the page’s name in d5mantui and once it appears in the search results, open it by pressing ENTER.

Benefits

Compared to other personal Wiki approaches, D5Man provides the following set of advantages:

• Terminal-only workflow possible. This allows for good integration into an environment where most applications in use are also running in terminals.
• Full control over individual files: D5Man does not write to the documents below the “roots” except for creating new pages. Apart from that, writing is the sole responsibility of the text editor. Additionally, pages exist as dedicated files allowing existing backup procedures to be effective for saving D5Man files as well.
• Partial Publishing. It is possible to publish only a subset of the actually present documents as to distinguish between public and private information. Use of different sections for this purpose makes the distinction clear at all times.
• Balanced Markup Language. D5Man Legacy proposed an own syntax. While it is superior in certain aspects, it turned out to be too difficult to parse correctly. Thus D5Man 2 uses a thoughtfully crafted subset of Pandoc’s Markdown which ensures compatibility with printed and web-based formats and provides reasonably well-readable and easily editable source files.
• Minimality. After a failed attempt to develop a “large” system for the purpose, D5Man 2 stays minimal. At the core (Perl and Erlang parts), its source code is less than 1000 lines of code!

Alternatives

There are countless approaches to do static blogs or personal wikis.

Static website generation with Markdown

Close-to-comprehensive list: https://www.staticgen.com/, some candiates: Hugo, Jekyll

Local Wikis

• Dedicated wiki: DokuWiki
• Fossil SCM integrates a Wiki and Issue Tracker storing all data in an SQLite database.
• EMACS Org-Mode

Using VIM as a personal notekeeping application or Wiki

• with help files: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Add_your_note_files_to_Vim_help, https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Keep_a_to-do_memo_file_with_links_as_in_Vim_help
• with vimwiki: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki, https://github.com/lervag/wiki.vim
• https://github.com/tomtom/vikibase_vim

D5Man Format 2

If you are interested in the old D5Man Legacy format, see d5man/legacy(32). Here, a selected subset of the elements from the rich syntax described in the Pandoc documentation is presented in order to obtain a sensible subset. Of course, there is no technical restriction for sticking to this subset.

D5Man’s text format is expected to always be read and written in UTF-8 encoding.

Metadata

A D5Man 2 Document begins with a header of following form:

---
section: 32
x-masysma-name: d5man2
title: Ma_Sys.ma D5Man 2
lang: en-US
author: ["Linux-Fan, Ma_Sys.ma (Ma_Sys.ma@web.de)"]
keywords: ["d5man", "d5man2", "d5manapi", "d5mantui", "ial"]
---

This header which follows YAML syntax is called the metadata in D5Man. It is a set of key-value assignments of form key: value. All fields which do not have any special meaning for Pandoc are prefixed x-masysma- as to indicate that they are additional fields used for D5Man. The use of the fields is as follows:

section (required)

Defines the section this page is part of. It is not really used in its Pandoc meaning (which would be the section for an actual manpage exported from the document), but the concept of D5Man manpages and actual manpages is similar to some extent (both provide textual information).

title (required)

Defines a document title (in legacy D5Man called description) which is a single large heading to go above the document.

lang (optional)

Gives the language in which the document (and/or its metadata) are written.

author (optional)

Gives a list of authors. Syntax ["Linux-Fan, Ma_Sys.ma..."] creates a YAML list with just one element in the example above.

keywords (required)

A list of keywords (also in YAML syntax) to assign to the page. Note that D5Man API search querys consider only x-masysma-name, section and keywords and matches case-sensitively against prefixes. It is thus often useful to provide sensible subsets of the page’s name in the keywords section. In legacy D5Man, this was called tags.

date (optional)

Specifies the date of document creation in YYYY/MM/DD HH:ii:ss format.

toc (optional)

Controls the generation of a table of contents for PDF exports (processed by pandoc only).

x-masysma-name (required)

Determines the page’s name. For newly created pages, it is recommended to chose names satisfying the regex [a-z0-9_/]+. Other names are supported, but may not contain any whitespace or other characters that are uncommon in file names processed by scripts (except for /). For Document-Root organizazion, the file name should be the page’s name with / replaced by _ and an additional .md suffix. For tasks, suffix .hot should be used.

x-masysma-task-priority (required and only allowed for tasks)

Specifies the priority of this task (cf. section D5Man TUI Task Management). Allowed values are the following: red, green, black, white, yellow, purple, delayed, considered.

x-masysma-task-type (required and only allowed for tasks)

Specifies the type fo this task (cf. section D5Man TUI Task Management). Allowed values are the following: long, short, subtask, periodic.

x-masysma-version, x-masysma-copyright (optional)

Specifies a version and copyright for the document (and the program it is describing). Format and use of these fields are entirely up to the user.

x-masysma-repository (optional)

Provides a link to the source code repository associated with the document and/or the software it describes.

x-masysma-website (optional)

Provides a link to the respective page on the (Ma_Sys.ma) Website. This allows e.g. Github users to find the Website which provides a correctly exported (i.e. readable) version of the distorted view that Github creates out of D5Man’s Markdown files.

x-masysma-owned (optional)

If present, this enables the inclusion of Ma_Sys.ma Logo and Icons in exported PDF files. Of course, the logos can also be replaced by different ones for local usage. Or one can leave out this key to avoid the use of logos in the export results altogether.

x-masysma-redirect (optional)

This field either gives an absolute URL (https://...) or a file name. In case a file name is given, the given file (relative to the attachment directory) is opened instead of opening the page when running from D5Man TUI. All pages available through IAL need to supply this field.

x-masysma-download (optional)

Specify an URL for downloading a file (used for Website generation).

x-masysma-web-priority, x-masysma-web-changefreq (optional)

Defines a priority (0.0–1.0) and a change frequency (monthly, weekly etc.) to be used in sitemaps generated during the XHTML export. Default is priority=0.4, changefreq=monthly.

x-masysma-expires (optional)

Expiry date. Same format as date. The meaning of this field is up to the user’s interpretation.

Section Structure

The section structure used by the Ma_Sys.ma is as given in the following table.

Attachments

By convention, images included in the document are stored in a directory called the same as the page’s name with (/ replaced by _) and a suffix _att (instead of .md).

For instance, this README.md has name d5man2 thus the attachments would be stored in a directory d5man2_att next to the file. For page d5man/legacy, attachments go to d5man_legacy_att etc.

Additionally, images which are supplied in vector formats (SVG or PDF) are included by their file name without extension. This allows the LaTeX export to use a PDF file and the XHTML export to use a SVG file without changing the source file. Finally, D5Man’s XHTML export also instantiates a simple automatic conversion from PDF to SVG in order to avoid storing redundant vector graphics in the attachments directory.

Unlike legacy D5Man, an explicit list of all files attached is no longer needed to be declared in the documents themselves.

Top-Level Structure

Documents consist of the leading metadata block (see Metadata) followed by a D5Man document which consists of headings, lists, tables, code and paragraphs.

Headings

D5Man proposes three levels of headings. The top-level headings are underlined by equals signs. The second-level headings are prefixed by ## (hash-hash-space). The third-level headings are prefixed by ### (hash-hash-hash-space). The following code shows all the heading styles.

Top-Level Heading
=================

Top-Level (e.g. introductory) content.

## Second-Level Heading

Second-Level Content

### Third-Level Heading aka. List Title

Inner Content / End of example.

Lists

D5Man has numbered, unnumbered and definition lists. Legacy D5Man also proposed pro and contra-style lists which are as of now not retained in D5Man 2. Unnumberd list items are prefixed by an asterisk (*), numbered lists are prefixed by the item’s number followed by a dot (1., 2., etc.) and description lists’ contents are prefixed by a : at the beginning of the first line of the description list’s content. Note that for description lists, the offset from the left has to be exactly four characters wide (: / colon-space-space-space on the first line; / space-space-space-space on the second line onwards). Here are examples for the respective list types.

Description List
:   This is the term being described.
    This is the second line of the term being described.
Second Description List Item
:   Another item to be described.

 1. First Item of a numbered list:
    This item has an additional line in source code.
 2. Second
 3. Third
 4. Fourth

 * Item 1 of the unnumberd list has
   two lines in source code.
 * Item 2 has a single line.
    * Nested Item a
    * Nested Item b
 * Item 3

Tables

Two distinct notations exist for tables: Tables with headings and without headings. All tables start from the first character in the line and leave two spaces between columns.

For tables with headings, there is a single dashed line below the individual headings. Example:

Caption 1   Caption 2
----------  ------------
Inner Cell  Inner Cell 2
Other Cell  Last Cell

For tables without headings, the same dashed lines are created and put above and below the respective table. Leaving out the captions, the table from before becomes this:

----------  ------------
Inner Cell  Inner Cell 2
Other Cell  Last Cell
----------  ------------

Code

Top-level code can be declared by either indenting the code with at least a single tab character or by enclosing it in lines with three tilde characters (~~~).

Example for tilde-based code section (the source code uses indentation to make this appear as code in the output document):

~~~
code content
~~~

The tilde-based notation allows for a programming language to be declared by replacing the first ~~~ with ~~~{.language} where language is replaced by a programming language name as known to pandoc. Examples include c, markdown and java.

Alternatively, here is the indented variant (the source code uses tilde symbols to make this appear as code in the output document):

    code content

Paragraphs and Inline Formatting

Paragraphs are just regular text separated by two newlines. Throughout the document’s text, it is possible to use inline formatting to place emphasis, links etc. It is described in the following.

Code

By using backtick-quotation, inline code can be expressed (`code` displays code). Escaping backticks inline requires them to be sourrounded by more backticks and space. See stackoverflow.com/82718 for details.

Emphasis

Like the legacy D5Man format, Markdown supports emphasis by surrounding the text to be emphasized with underscores e.g. _emphasized_ yields emphasized.

Superset and subset

Putting something in an index works by adding tilde symbols (~) around the part to be lowered, e.g. H~2~O for H₂O. Elevating parts of a word is possible by surrounding it with hat symbols (^) e.g. 10^2^ for 10²

Links

Links to URLs or other pages are of format [shortcut name](URL) e.g. [Example Page](http://www.example.com/) gives Example Page. If a link is given by URL only, it is given in angled-brackets like this: <http://www.example.com> gives http://www.example.com. To link to another D5Man page, its XHTML name needs to be given: [d5man/legacy(32)](d5man_legacy.xhtml) gives d5man/legacy(32). By convention, the link to another page is labelled by that page’s name followed by its section in parentheses. To link to pages in other sections, one needs to prefix ../SECTION to the link’s target due to the D5Man directory structure being organized in sections (even if it was originally a Program-Root structure, D5Man export always generates files as if they were part of a Document-Root structure). Note that unlike in legacy D5Man, links are expected to only work for the XHTML export. Navigating the hypertext directly inside the editor is no longer a supported use case.

Math

Inline Math is only supported for the PDF exports and can be expressed by LaTeX’ single-dollar notation, e.g. $\binom{1}{1}$ becomes $\binom{1}{1}$.

For qotation and symbols, legacy D5Man used some automatic replacement logic. With the new version, this feature is no longer available, thus the use of UTF-8 symbols is suggested. On some Linux systems, quotation is easily available by [ALTGR]-[V] („), [ALTGR]-[B] (“) and [ALTGR]-[N] (”).

Forced spaces (aka. non-breaking spaces) can be inserted by using the respective unicode symbols. As described by Thomas Peklak, a single non-breaking space can be entered in VIM by pressing [CTRL]-[K] [SPACE] [SPACE]. Similarly, a forced half-space can be entered by using the sequence [CTRL]-[V] [U] [2] [0] [2] [F].

Arrows are best inserted by using their UTF-8 symbols. The paragraph below shows a few examples, see http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_arrows.html for a more comprehensive treatise.

Arrows: ← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ ⇔

Images

The general syntax for images is ![CAPTION](FILE). By convention, FILE is given relative to the page’s file and if it is associated directly to the page, then it is placed in a directory with the page’s name concatenated with a trailing _att.

For instance, an attachment test.png for this very page would be loaded by specifying ![Test](d5man2_att/test.png).

Note that for .svg and .pdf files the extension of the image file name is normally not given in order to allow an automatic detection by pandoc/LaTeX to take place.

Compiling and Installing D5Man 2

D5Man 2 requires an Erlang OTP runtime and a suitable Perl interpreter as well as a selection of Perl modules. A declaration of all dependencies for an installation on a Debian stable system can be found in file build.xml.

Only the Erlang-based d5mantui requires external dependencies and needs to be compiled, all other D5Man 2 components are scripts and run without compilation or further processing. As a build dependency, mdvl-cecho (or alternatively cecho as commented-out in rebar.config) is required. You can get the build instructions for package mdvl-cecho here: https://github.com/m7a/lp-cecho.

Prior to attempting to run D5Man TUI, adjust its config file at d5mantui4/config/sys.config to refer to your local paths!

To compile the individual parts, it might be sufficient to call make in directory d5mantui4. After this has succeeded, all components are on disk. To generate an installable Debian package, ant and the usual build tools for Debian packages are required. One can then build the package by invoking ant package in the repository’s top-level directory.

d5mantui

The D5Man Terminal User Interface (TUI) displays query results interactively in the terminal while typing the query. Additionally, it contains functions to build a basic Task Management system on top of D5Man.

Synopsis

d5mantui [query]

Configuration

D5Man TUI can be configured through the sys.config file. The default configuration looks as follows:

[{d5mantui4, [
    {db_roots,       ["/data/main/119_man_rr", "/data/main/120_mdvl_rr"]},
    {command_editor, ["/usr/bin/vim"]},
    {newpage_root,   "/data/main/119_man_rr"}
]},
{kernel, [{error_logger, {file, "/tmp/d5mantui4.log"}}]}
].

Users must change this config prior to using D5man TUI!

The meaning of the properties is as follows:

db_roots

Declares a list of directories to consult for D5Man pages. They can be either in Document-Root or Program-Root organization. All the pages found below the respective roots will be available for querying.

newpage_root

Specifies the directory in which new pages are created.

command_editor

Configures the Editor to use. It is recommended to use a terminal-based editor which creates a new instance upon invocation of this command.

error_logger file

Configures a log to write errors to. In event of a D5Man TUI crash, please delete this file, reproduce the issue and then send the contents of this log file to the Ma_Sys.ma for analysis.

Usage

The screen could e.g. look as follows:

─────────────────────────────[ Ma_Sys.ma D5Man Terminal User Interface 4.0.0 ]──

 [                                                                            ]

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────[ Query Results ]──

   11 adler32         31 web/news                32 kbdcheck
   11 bin2bmp         31 web/programs            32 lz4_ada
   11 ma_capsblinker  32 big4                    32 ma_inventory
   11 ma_open_cl_info 32 blake3_ada              32 masysmaci/build
   11 ma_sitecopy     32 bruteforce3             32 masysmaci/main
   11 maartifact      32 conf-cli                32 masysmaci/pkgsync
   11 maerct          32 conf-gui                32 matrix_screensaver
   11 mahalt          32 d5man/legacy            32 maxbupst
   11 maloadmon       32 decode_girocode         32 megasync
   11 syssheet        32 gamuhr                  32 pressed_keys
   31 keysigning      32 i3bar                   32 progress
   31 web/about       32 ial                     32 scanning
   31 web/creative    32 image_viewer            32 screenindex
   31 web/gpl         32 internet-enable-disable 32 shellscripts
   31 web/knowledge   32 java-nostalgic-tools    32 ssd-optimization
   31 web/main        32 jmbb                    32 tar_ada

 1       2New    3       4All    5       6Docs   7Tasks  8-DLY   9-Sub   0Quit 

The first line is a prompt where the user can enter any query that will be used to find pages. The list below displays the search results and can be scrolled with [UP] and [DOWN] arrows on the keyboard. Upon pressing [ENTER], the selected page is opened.

All commandline arguments to d5manqtui are treated as an input for the prompt. If the initial query (as given on the commandline) yields exactly one result, the TUI will not be displayed and the respective page will be opened directly.

Function keys can be used as described in the following subsections.

[F2] – New Page/Task

One can press [F2] to create a new page. To do this, the input at the prompt needs to be in format SECTION NAME i.e. the new page’s section followed by its name. D5Man TUI then clears the prompt.

In case of a regular page, it directly asks for a space-separated list of tags to assign to the page. Common tags are displayed in the Query Results while this mode is active. After pressing [ENTER], a predefined template is copied to a new file and opened it in the configured editor.

If SECTION is set to 43 then metadata about the task is also queried from the prompt (press [ENTER] to continue) and afterwards a task rather than a page is be created.

This function only supports Document-Root organization for creating new files.

[F4] – All

Displays all results for the given query (default). Queries will return tasks as well as documents depending on which matches the input string.

[F6] – Docs

Hides tasks from the result list.

[F7], [F8], [F9] – D5Man TUI Task Management

Since package version 1.0.54, D5Man provides some basic means to manage “tasks”, i.e. TODO lists or issues or the like. The idea behind this scheme is to leverage the Markdown format and D5Man’s querying capabilities for management of tasks. Two distinct dimensions are considered to organize tasks:

1. The task type specifies if this task is long, short, periodic or a subtask. The order of display is: periodic, then long, then short.
2. The task priority specifies how important a task is by assinging colors (purple, red, yellow, green, black, white). The use of the colors is up to the user. Instead of a color a task can also be in state considered or delayed: Considered means that it should be kept in mind but is not assigned any priority (think: very low priority) and delayed means that it may be hidden because it is not expected to be worked on any time soon (e.g. not in the current week).

D5Man assings the file extension .hot to task files to distinguish them from documents and all tasks are placed and expected to be in section 43. D5Man automatically finds tasks in Document-Root structures’ section 43. Also, it scans the directories in Program-Root structures for TODO.hot files and adds them to the tasks to consider.

The x-masysma-name field is expected to be set to a short identifier (e.g. code and number or similar) whereas the title is expected to summarize the matter of the task.

[F8] – DLY

By default, tasks of priority delayed are displayed. [F8] is a tristate toggle that displays the action that is going to happen when pressing it:

1. 8-DLY – First press [F8] to hide (-) the delayed tasks from the view and display only non-delayed tasks.
2. 8=DLY – Press [F8] again to display only (=) delayed tasks
3. 8+DLY – Press [F8] again to add non-delayed tasks (+) to the view again (returns to the initial state).

[F9] – Subtasks

By default, tasks of type subtask are displayed. [F9] is a tristate toggle that displays the action that is going to happen when pressing it:

1. 9-Sub – First press [F9] to hide (-) the subtasks from the view and display only long/short/periodic ones.
2. 9=Sub – Press [F9] again to display only (=) subtasks.
3. 9+Sub – Press [F9] again to add non-subtasks (+) to the view again (returns to the initial state).

Change History

Before the current revision (D5Man TUI 4), there was an implementation consisting of a daemon (d5manapi) and a client (d5mantui perl script / v.3). This had some advantages but was mostly much more complex than the current implementation.

The new D5Man TUI 4 is close to a rewrite of the old functionality and thus doesn’t run fully stable yet. See xdev/d5mantui3.pl and xdev/d5manapi for the old variants of these components.

d5manexportpdf

Name

d5manexportpdf – Script to export D5Man 2 Pandoc Markdown to PDF

Synopsis

d5manexportpdf INPUT.md

Description

This invokes pandoc on the provided filename INPUT.md and writes the export result to INPUT.md.pdf (i.e. adds extension .pdf to the input file name). Note that due to hardcoded paths, this script only works if D5Man 2 is installed (e.g. as a Debian package).

The script deliberately contains almost no logic at all. This allows it to be ported to other scripting languages like Windows Batch. Additionally, a “regular” pandoc invocation can serve as a fallback if D5Man 2 is not available.

Example

d5manexportpdf README.md

This should produce a nicely readable PDF for any instructions supplied as part of Ma_Sys.ma repositories.

Troubleshooting export issues

If the export fails during the invocation of pdflatex, it will most likely generate a meaningless error message. Here is a regex for finding unicode chars which might not be supported:

/[^\x00-\x7F]

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16987362/how-to-get-vim-to-highlight-non-ascii-characters

d5manexporthtml

Name

d5manexporthtml – Export D5Man 2 roots to multiple XHTML pages

Synopsis

d5manexporthtml -o DESTDIR -i ROOT[,ROOT...] [-s SECTION[,SECTION...]] [-m PDF2SVG] [-u URLPREFIX] [-- PANDOCOPTIONS...]

Description

D5Man 2’s HTML export exports a selection of sections from (optionally multiple) root directories to a given output directory structure. The output structure resembles a Document-Root structure independently of whether the given ROOT directories are Document-Root or Program-Root organized.

In addition to the exported XHTML pages, a sitemap.xml and .htaccess files are generated to allow hosting the result structure online. PDF attachments are automatically converted to SVG.

Options

-o DESTDIR

Configures the output directory to be DESTDIR

-i ROOT[,ROOT...]

Configures a comma-separated list of input directories. (As a result, it is currently impossible to process directories which contain comma as part of their name)

-s SECTION[,SECTION...]

Specifies a list of sections to export. If this is not given, the default value of 11,31,32,33,34,37,38,39 will be used.

-m PDF2SVG

Specifies the path to a pdf2svg executable. On Debian systems, package pdf2svg can be installed and then the default /usr/bin/pdf2svg will be sufficient. In other cases, it might be necessary to create an auxiliary script that invokes Inkscape or another tool capable of converting PDF to SVG. The pdf2svg is expected to take the input PDF file as its first parameter and the output SVG file as its second parameter.

-u URLPREFIX

Defines a prefix to be used for sitemap generation. By default, it is set to &masysma_url_prefix; which will most likely not work. In case the generated sitemap is of interest, this parameter needs to be given and have an URL value. The Ma_Sys.ma Website uses -u https://masysma.lima-city.de, for instance.

-- PANDOCOPTIONS...

After the double dashes, an arbitrary number of pandoc options can be given which are passed directly to the pandoc command. Most users will want to specify a --template=... here in order to obtain a nicely formatted page up to their liking.

Ma_Sys.ma Variables

Using this script, the invocation of pandoc is passed the following additional variables:

x-masysma-source

Set to the Markdown source code file name for the current page.

x-masysma-meta-revised

Set to the pages last modification in UTC (YYYY-mm-dd HH:ii:ss)

x-masysma-revised-human

Set to the pages last modification in local timezone (YYYY/mm/dd HH:ii:ss)

Examples

As an example, consider downloading some of the Ma_Sys.ma Repositories into a common directory tree to obtain a structure as shown above in section Example for a Program-Root Structure: Ma_Sys.ma Repositories.

Then, you could create an XHTML export of their contents as follows:

$ mkdir /tmp/test
$ d5manexporthtml -o /tmp/test -i /rr

Below the output directory /tmp/test, this will create a document-root structure of output files like this:

/tmp/test
 |
 +-- 11/
 |    |
 |    +-- maloadmon_att/
 |    |    |
 |    |    +-- ...
 |    |
 |    +-- ...
 |
 +-- 32/
 |    |
 |    +-- d5man2.md
 |    |
 |    +-- d5man2.xhtml
 |    |
 |    +-- ...
 |
 +-- ...

Opening d5man2.xhtml one can see the XHTML representation of this very page, it might look as follows:

Excerpt from exporting this very page to XHTML (beginning of the page shown)

Without further options, exporting uses the template supplied with pandoc. If you want to use this for your own purposes, it makes sense to derive an own template for customization.