4 releases
| 0.2.1 | Jan 4, 2022 |
|---|---|
| 0.2.0 | Dec 31, 2021 |
| 0.1.2 | Dec 29, 2021 |
| 0.1.1 | Dec 28, 2021 |
#555 in Text processing
51 downloads per month
19KB
298 lines
mdbook-fs-summary
A preprocessor that generates a summary from the file structure of your book rather than using an explicit SUMMARY.md file.
Benefits
Frequently, you want the organization of your files to simply be mirrored in the SUMMARY.md file rather than have to manually set it yourself. We can automate this by following a few conventions:
| Convention | Example | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter index | 00.md |
Represents the page for the parent folder |
| Sorted by filenames | 04_cli.md or 06_docs/ |
Use leading numbers to sort pages (though not strictly enforced to have numbers in the filenames like this) |
| Partials | _shared.md |
Partials start with an underscore and will be ignored in the summary |
| Page titles | # Page Title |
Page names (rendered in the navigation) come from the first H1 header of the page. An error is thrown if there is no title. |
| Prefix chapters | 00_prologue.md |
Prefix chapters start with 00 (excluding 00.md) |
| Suffix chapters | ZZ_final_words.md |
Suffix chapters start with ZZ |
| Draft chapters | 04_advanced_configuration().md or 05_administration()/ |
Draft pages and folders end with () |
| Separators | 02__ or 02___________ |
Separators are files that end with two underscores __ |
| Part Titles | 05_reference_#.md |
Filenames ending in # indicate a part title and the title comes from the first H1 header |
These conventions should create a filesystem structure that, when sorted alphanumerically, is the same in the final render.
00_prologue.md → prefix chapter
01_intro.md
02_install/
├─ 00.md → chapter index
├─ 01_linux.md
├─ 02_mac.md ↓ files sorted naturally
├─ 03_windows.md
├─ 04_______ → separator
├─ 05_post_install.md
├─ _common_install_tips.md → ignored "partial"
03_caveat.md
04_##_guide_##.md → part title
05_usage.md/
├─ 00.md
├─ 01_basics/
│ ├─ 00.md
│ ├─ 01_setup.md
│ ├─ 02_monitoring.md
06_administration()/ → draft chapter
├─ 00.md
├─ 01_install().md → nested draft chapter
ZZ_final_words.md → suffix chapter
Usage
You must create a dummy SUMMARY.md, otherwise mdbook will error out before the preprocessors get called. (The contents aren't important. It can just have # SUMMARY as the first line.)
Install the project with cargo. The current version is v0.2.1.
cargo install mdbook-fs-summary
There aren't a lot of configurations right now.
# book.toml
[preprocessor.fs-summary]
# (default: true)
clean-paths = true
# other preprocessors will naturally need to
# run after the summary has been generated
[preprocessor.links]
after = ["fs-summary"]
Clean Paths
We are using filename indicators to apply configurations to the generated summary. That's not ideal, so they are stripped to their natural paths.
Instead of:
http://localhost:3000/02_team/05_onboarding.html
We strip the numeric prefixes used for sorting and any other artificial indicators.
http://localhost:3000/team/onboarding.html
⚠️ Cleaning paths currently breaks support for the default links preprocessor provided by mdbook. See this pull request. It is recommended to disable clean paths until this is resolved if you intend to use partials.
Disable Clean Paths
You can turn off this behavior.
[preprocessor.fs-summary]
clean-paths = false
[preprocessor.links]
after = ["fs-summary"]
Numeric Prefix Format
This processor doesn't dictate any special format for numeric prefixes used for sorting except when cleaning paths. Currently the convention is this:
If the filename starts with 2 or 3 numbers or upper case letters followed by an underscore, they'll get stripped in the resulting URLs.
This is just something to note if you plan on some other sorting strategy for your filenames.
Alternatives
- mdbook-auto-gen-summary - Similar goals with different conventions and writes the resulting table of contents to
SUMMARY.md.
Dependencies
~12–25MB
~339K SLoC