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Wortsammler

Wortsammler (colloquial German for word collector) is an environment to maintain doucmentation in markdown and publish it in various formats for different audiences. It originated in some project specific hacks wrapping around pandoc. But now I refactored it since I use it in more than two projects now and think it might be beneficial for others as well.

Typical application of Wortsammler is user manuals, project documents, user manuals.

Particular features of wortsammler are

  • various output formats
  • support of requirement management
  • generate documents for different audiences based on single sources
  • support for snippets
  • include parts from other PDF files (only for pdf output yet)

Basically Wortsammler comprises of

  • a directory structure for source document sources

  • a manifest file to control the publication process

    • involved input files
    • expected output formats
    • expected editions
    • Requirements tracing (upstream / downstream)

  • a command line tool to produce the doucments (wortsammler)

Wortsammler is built on top of other open source tools, in particular:

  • pandoc
  • LaTeX
  • ruby and a bunch of gems

I did not invent new markdown syntax to implement the features mentioned aforehead. In other words, any wortsammler flavored markdown file should reasonably be processed in standalone pandoc. I implemented particular patterns which are boiled down to either vanilla pandoc markdown or to LaTeX / HTML.

The features are based on three appraoches:

  1. particular pattern in existing markdown
  2. embedded HTML/LaTeX
  3. specific syntax in strikethrouh sections (e.g. ED simple)

Installation

$ gem install wortsammler

In order to use Wortsammler, you need to install the prerequisites:

  • ruby 1.9.3 of course

  • pandoc 1.9.4.2 or above

    I plan to upgrade to 1.11.1 asap

  • tex, in particular xelatex 3.1415926-2.4-0.9998

getting started

display the options

wortsammler -h

process markdown files

wortsammler -pi readme.md -o.  
   -- generates readme.pdf

wortsammler -pi readme.md -f pdf:docx:html -o. 
    -- generates readme.pdf, readme.html, readme.docx

wortsammler -bi readme.md
    -- beautifies readme.md (normalizes the markdown)

wortsammler -bi .
    -- recursively beautifies all markdown files in the current folder

initialize a project

wortsammler init <folder>

This command generates the proposed directory structure, a first document manifest and a rake file to do the processing.

The rakefile is in <folder>/30_Sources/ZSUPP_Tools

generate document

rake -T           -- show all rake tasks
rake sample       -- format the sample document

known issues

  • as usual documentation is not complete
  • requirement collection only works via manifest
  • some features (in particular referencing) should use pandoc 1.11 features
  • HTML and DOCX styling does not work
  • It extends String
  • Specific syntax in strikethrough is still processed as one line which is not very robust
  • as of now the "framework" is hard to use in other applications
  • pdf_utilities only run on OSX

future plans

contributing

  1. play with it
  2. give feedback to [email protected] and/or create issues
  3. Fork it
  4. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  5. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  6. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  7. Create new Pull Request

License

MIT: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

thanks to

Installation of the required software

Ruby

Please use Ruby 1.9.3

  • mac:

    • installation requirex xcode with the commanline tools
    • use Ruby Version Manager [https://rvm.io][]
    • rvm install ruby_1.9.3
    • might take pretty long depending on wha you have on your mac.
    • after ruby is installed gem install wortsammler

  • windows

pandoc

TeX