RenderAsMarkdown

RenderAsMarkdown is a small Ruby gem featuring simple to use classes to turn data into Markdown.

This project started when rmetzler tried to render data into a Markdown table. While this was easy to achive with templating, a dedicated helper gem was more reuseable and produced output that was also easier to scan in ASCII.

Ultimately this helper should turn into something like a DSL to create and scaffold Markdown documents. In particular it should be very useful to create project documentation files like README.md, TODO.md, LICENSE.md, etc. with it. Github is able to render Markdown as HTML so automatically generated project documentation could be displayed on http://github.com

• See Implementation for what's implemented yet.
• See Getting started if you want to hack on it.

Markdown is a (supposed to be) simple markup language that can be written and converted into HTML easily.

It was created by John Gruber in December 2004 and has grown in popularity since. Developers started to adapt Markdown and several different Markdown dialects emerged:

• Original Markdown Syntax
• Github created Github flavored Markdown
• MultiMarkdown adds features for multiple files
• iA Writer uses a slightly different dialect

Headers in Markdown can be written in two different notations. the #-Notation where you just prepend # for H1, ## for H2, ### for H3 ... up to H5. You get the concept.

And there is the underline Notation for H1 (===) and H2 (---). This notation is easier to scan in ASCII files, but its not as simple to implement in Markdown templates as the #-notation is. So I wrote two little helpers classes.

Links in Markdown have a URL, text (optional) and hint (optional).

Images in Markdown have a URL, an alt text and a hint (optional).

Lists in Markdown start with a dash and a space in every line.

Items of Todo-Lists in GFM start like this

- [ ] this task isn't done yet
- [x] this task is done

The done version isn't implemented yet.

There are different notations for Code in Markdown. Currently the implementation just indent every line by 4 spaces.

It's really easy to render a table in (GHf)MD, but the simplest approach doesn't look that nice in raw mode. That's why there is this simple class, tables work in the terminal AND on Github.

    t = RenderMarkdown::Table.new %w{eins zwei superkalifrageristric}
    t << %w{hoch-soll-er-leben 3 mal-hoch}
    puts t.render

renders the following table

    eins              |zwei|superkalifrageristric
    ------------------|----|---------------------
    hoch-soll-er-leben|3   |mal-hoch

Thanks to Github, this is also rendered in HTML. Nice!

$ bundle exec rake test