The Python module multimd

I beg your pardon for my english...

English is not my native language, so be nice if you notice misunderstandings, misspellings, or grammatical errors in my documents and codes.

This document is a short tutorial showing the most useful features without being exhaustive.

About multimd

Working with moderate sized MD documents in a single file can quickly become tedious. This project allows you to go through separate small MD files to be merged into a final single MD file.

At the moment, resources, such as images, are not managed.

README.md part by part

With multimd, you can write a MD document by typing small section-like parts which are easy to maintain. Consider the README.md file from the src2prod project which was written using the following tree on 6 May 2023.

+ src2prod
    * README.md
    + readme
        * about.yaml
        * about.md
        * build.md
        * cli.md
        * example-used.md
        * only-files.md
        * prologue.md
        * readme-splitted.md
    + ...

The special about.yaml file is used to specify a specific order in which the different MD files are put together (without this file, a "natural" order is used). Its content is as follows: we give the list of the files without their extension.

toc:
  - prologue
  - about
  - example-used
  - build
  - only-files
  - readme-splitted
  - cli

WARNING! You can use relative paths but you must use the Unix path separator /.

Building the final README.md file is done quickly on the command line using multimd after using the cd command to go into the src2prod folder. We use the option -e to allow to erase an existing README.md file.

> multimd -e readme README.md
Successfully built file.
  + Path given:
    README.md
  + Full path used:
    /full/path/to/README.md

There is also an easy-to-use Python API.

from multimd import Builder, Path

mybuilder = Builder(
    src   = Path("/full/path/to/readme"),
    dest  = Path("/full/path/to/README.md"),
    erase = True
)
mybuilder.build()

NOTE. It is possible to work with subfolders containing MD files. In this case, multimd will work recursively. In the about.yaml file, the path to a subfolder simply ends with the Unix path separator / like in one/sub/folder/.

Without the special about.yaml file

Without an about.yaml file, all the MD files will be merged into one after sorting them in a "natural" order.

WARNING! Without an about.yaml file, it is impossible to work with subfolders containing MD files.