pdtmpl.1

APP

pdtmpl

SYSNOPSIS

pdtmpl OPTIONS VERB

DESCRIPTION

pdtmpl is a Pandoc preprocessor intended as a simple platform to test various ideas about how to better support Pandoc generated static websites.

The first use case is to take a JSON or YAML file turning the data into a YAML block that then is sent through Pandoc using the a Pandoc template and any additional Pandoc processing options.

The second use vase is to take a Markdown document, scan it for YAML blogs containing a “form” object then replacing those blocks with an HTML block holding a web form. The goal of the usecase is to see if that improves readability of the original Markdown file also making the aggregated HTML generated from Pandoc easier to manage.

VERB

pdtmpl expect a verb to describe the use case be tested. Currently support verbs are

help

Display this help page.

tmpl

Apply the template preprosor for turning raw JSON and YAML into a Markdown stream sent to Pandoc over standard io.

webform

This reads and writes to standard io replace any embedded YAML blocks with a form object with HTML blocks containing a webform defined by the form object.

OPTIONS

-help

display usage

-license

display license

-version

display version

-i INPUT

Is a text file with embedded YAML blocks to be transformed into HTML blocks (e.g. a Markdown file)

-o OUTPUT

write Pandoc output to file

EXAMPLES

In this example we have a JSON object document called “example.json” and a Pandoc template called “example.tmpl”. A redirect “<” is used to pipe the content of “example.json” into the command line tool pdtmpl.

pdtmpl tmpl example.tmpl < example.json

Render example.json as Markdown document. We need to use Pandoc’s own options of “-s” (stand alone) and “-t” (to tell Pandoc the output format)

pdtmpl tmpl “” -s -t markdown < example.json

Process a “codemeta.json” file with “codemeta-md.tmpl” to produce an about page in Markdown via Pandocs template processing (the “codemeta-md.tmpl” is a Pandoc template marked up to produce Markdown output).

pdtmpl -i codemeta.json -o about.md tmpl
codemeta-md.tmpl

In this example we have a markdown file called “guestbook.md” is processed and then sent through Pandoc to render as HTML.

pdtmpl webform guestbook.md | pandoc -f Markdown -t HTML5 -s \
  >guestbook.html