This work by tirimid is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
CMFC is a compiler for a markup language I designed, CMF. This page will serve as both documentation and a tutorial surrounding both of them, should anybody want to use them. CMFC was created specifically for my personal website (the one you are on right now) and does not have any particularly advanced features. Still, I think it is good enough for simple articles and sharing my basic thoughts on the internet.
Of course, this leads to the question of "why not just use Markdown and
Jekyll build with GitHub pages?". The answer to this question is twofold - first
of all, it's cool to make things yourself. Second of all, it irritates me how,
in Markdown, paragraphs always have to begin on a double-newline separation. I
would much rather write my plaintext document files in a style more similar to
academic books, where the preferred style is generally no linebreaks but use of
indentation to mark paragraph starts. Similarly, I'd prefer for blockquotes to
be indented sections rather than just double-newline separated blocks with a >
in front of them. Those are the main reasons I created CMF. And CMFC was created
so that I could write documents in CMF and have them manifest as HTML files on
my website.
CMF stands for Custom Markup Format, and CMFC stands for Custom Markup
Format Compiler. I suggest using the .cmf file extension for CMF files.
CMFC is free software, licensed under the permissive MIT license. The source code for it is hosted on GitHub, and it is designed to work on Linux machines. Windows machines would probably work, but I make no guarantees. To prepare CMFC, clone the repository, Make it, then install it to your system as follows:
The cmfc binary will be installed to /usr/bin, and can be uninstalled at
any moment by going back to the cloned repository's directory and running this
command:
From an end-user's perspective, you only need to know the following sequence
of events, executed by the cmfc binary when invoked:
<style>Based on this simple process, we can understand the meaning of the command line flags which the program will accept:
-A will dump the AST directly instead of generating HTML-d will specify the docdata file which base DOC directives are read from-h will display help text-o will specify the output file (standard output if omitted)-s will specify the style file to put in the HTML's <style> sectionApart from the command line options, CMFC will also take one mandatory argument, the input file from which to read the CMF.
Say you have an input file, input.cmf, and you want an output file,
output.html, with a stylesheet, style.css, applied to it. In order to create
it, you would invoke the following command:
Pretty simple.
Paragraphs can either be initiated through a double-linebreak or by placing four consecutive space characters at the beginning of a line. I prefer to use the four consecutive spaces, since that's pretty much the reason CMF/CMFC were created to begin with.
Example paragraph:
Titles of various sizes can be created by using = immediately after a
double-linebreak. Similar to Markdown, the number of =s corresponds to the
HTML header size. That is, more =s means a smaller header (unless the style
file specifies otherwise).
Example titles:
Ordered and unordered lists can be created by using a # or a *
immediately after a double-linebreak, respectively. This was inspired by Wiki
syntax, which will often do something similar. The level of nesting is specified
by the number of consecutive #s or *s. Each following element in the list
is specified by placing a #/* at the beginning of the line.
Example ordered list:
Example unordered list:
Images are a standalone thing in CMF, unlike in Markdown, where they are
merely another text element like a link. As such, they must be declared separate
from other text. To add an image to the document, you must add a !()
immediately after a double-linebreak. After the !(), add the link to the image
you want to show up in the document.
Example image:
Blockquotes are meant to look how they do in academic books. To acheive such an effect, every line of a blockquote is indented by six spaces. I also suggest placing linebreaks between paragraphs and blockquote text. To initiate a blockquote, simply start a line with six spaces. Consecutive blockquote lines do not need to be similarly indented, but you should still do so for readability and visual clarity.
Example blockquote:
Long code snippets, like in Markdown, are enclosed in triple backticks. Unlike Markdown, however, you cannot use more than three backticks in a row to require more than three consecutive backticks in the long code snippet termination line. The long code snippet should be placed immediately after a double-linebreak.
Example long code snippet:
Tables are composed in plaintext form of cells, horizontally separated using
dashes (-), and vertically separated using pipes (|). The horizontal
separators are drawn overtop the vertical separators. To begin a table, place
three consecutive -s immediately after a double-linebreak. Note that a single
cell can take up more than one line, unlike in Markdown (another problem I have
with it).
Example table:
stuff will be added here eventually...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
| Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | consectetur adipiscing elit |
| sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua | Ut enim ad minim veniam |
| quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat | Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur |
stuff will be added here eventually...
This work by tirimid is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0