Currently I have been writing docs in markdown for easy viewing on github. Recently one said markdown file was going to be sent out to a 3rd party. Knowing these 3rd party members wouldn't be viewing the documents in a markdown viewer I thought the best solution would be to convert the markdown into styled html. I had looked on Github and found several blogging engines built around markdown files being converted to html and served via express. That isn't what I needed. So I wrote DocDown as a simple command-line tool to help with my productivity. Maybe it will help you as well.
Well you will need nodejs and npm, if you haven't used those yet go find a tutorial and get started :)
Once you have npm installed do the following
npm install -g docdown
The package includes a bin script that allows you to run docdown where ever on your systems.
A basic example is as follows, assuming you are in your folder with the markdown file called my_doc.markdown do the following
docdown --markdown my_doc.markdown
which will generate a file called my_doc.html in the local folder
You can specify a output file name if you don't want it to inherit the original source's filename
docdown --markdown my_doc.markdown --output super_doc.html
Will generate a file called super_doc.html in the local folder
The following variables can be used when calling the tool as the following
docdown --markdown my_doc.markdown --title "New project specs"
| Variable | Description | Default value |
| title | Title in the generated HTML | DocDown Generated File |
| author | Value in the meta tag author in the head of the document | None |
Eventually I'll add support for custom templates for the html, currently a really basic white template is used. I have the hooks in place for the cmd-line arguments to almost work.
In addition, I'd also like to add support to do an entire directory of markdown and create a directory of .html output
