Paged Markdown 3

Document format for scientific writing based on Markdown.

About

Paged Markdown 3 is an extension of the Markdown language, that adds new syntaxes for page-breaking, page-numbering, footnotes and more. Under the hood, it is using paged.js for content-pagination and implementing several W3C specifications for paged media.

The focus of the format is scientific writing, though it's most widely generic. Documents created in the format can be exported to PDF.

Getting started

To interact with Paged Markdown 3 documents, a Markdown-capable text editor is recommended (e.g. Atom or Visual Studio Code).

1. Create a new markdown document (e.g. document.md)
2. In the last line of your document, include Paged Markdown 3 as shown below:

   # Hello world
   
   --
   
   Page 2
   
   <script src="https://unpkg.com/paged-markdown-3/dist/paged.js"></script>

3. Open the Markdown-preview of your editor.
   You should see your contents rendered into pages (if not you may need to enable Javascript).
   That's it! You've just created your first Paged Markdown 3 document.

To learn about the various syntaxes of the format, have a look at example/scientific-paper.md.

The format should work with any Markdown-capable editor of your choice. In case you experience editor-specific inconsistencies please open an issue.

Preview Security Warnings

When opening the Markdown-preview, you may be asked to "Enable insecure content in this document". This is due to Paged Markdown 3 being a javascript extension.

Paged Markdown 3 is open source software, you may review its source code on Github or directly in the script loaded through unpkg.com. If you prefer to include the script locally from your machine, you can easily compile Paged Markdown 3 yourself.

Feature Roadmap

The following list contains features currently supported by Paged Markdown 3 or planned for future support:

• Manual page-breaks
• Page numbering
  • Control over number styles among pages (currently decimal, roman or none)
• Table of contents
  • Auto-detect and render tables, that look like tables of contents / figures / tables etc.
  • Include page number of the referenced target automatically based on its location in the document
• Footnotes
• Figures with captions
• Tables (not yet: syntax for captions)
• PDF export
• Extensible theming
• IEEE-cite linter
• Auto-generated bibliography
  • Maybe: Integration with Zotero

CSS Theming

As explained in the example document, the theming of Paged Markdown 3 documents can be adjusted through a user stylesheet file design.css, placed in the same directory as the Markdown document.

Besides user-theming and custom element definitions, design.css may contain global specifications about the document, such as the paper format, font-size and page margins (see example/design.css for reference).

PDF export

Documents created in Paged Markdown 3 can be exported to PDF using the pmd-pdf utility available on npm.

Usage:

> pmd-pdf <input.md> [output.pdf]

Development

Paged Markdown 3 is developed with buildtool.js.

To compile Paged Markdown 3 (namely paged.js, logic.css and preview.css), clone or download the latest version of the repository and run the following commands:

> npm install
> npm run build

For development, you may want to make use of the watch-feature of buildtool.js (rebuild on file changes).

You can do so by running:

> npm run dev

The compiled files will be produced inside dist/.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT-license.

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Paged Markdown 3 – Lesosoftware, 2022