Dove

Write single page HTML documents with ease.

I sometimes want to quickly draft documents in something other than LaTeX. I've realized that in the 21^st century HTML pages can easily serve that same purpose DOC, ODT and PDF files serve. Dove enables you to write your text in Markdown, then generate beautiful web documents.

Example output can be seen here.

I was really lazy and didn't want to bother converting Markdown into HTML, then inserting it into a HTML layout and bothering with syntax highlighting, so I've searched for alternatives. I've used Jekyll before, but for writing one-page documents I don't really need a full-blown static website solution. I then I had found rocco which is a code documentation generator, and I've used a bit of the code from it to write Dove, a (web) document generator.

Dove takes a Markdown file, converts it using Redcarpet, syntax highlights any code snippets inside using Rouge, then it takes a layout file (I use Slim) and uses Tilt to render it, and insert the document into the template. It also detects and extracts any YAML frontmatter and inserts it into the layout as variables!

Dove is meant to be used using it's binary file:

dove document.md

Glob patterns can also be used just as easily:

dove *.md README *.txt

But one can also require Dove inside a script, and make a new instance of it, passing in the filename and options, then use the render method.

dove = Dove.new('document.md', template_file: 'doc_layout.slim')
dove.render

Note: The default layout requires author and title YAML frontmatter.