Marka - Markup/LaTeX Rendering Made Simple

marka is a tool for making it more convenient to work with Pandoc Markdown. This is to support the complete replacement of normal LaTeX workflows with Markdown, without loosing any features.

Usage

Marka consists of two tools: marka and marka-combine The combiner is just like the preprocessor in C and is already called when using marka normally. To compile a file with marka, the basic call syntax is marka file.md, but for day-to-day rendering it is more convenient to use the marka -w file.md syntax, which will automatically rerender the file when any included file is changed.

Combination

The only way Marka Markdown differs from Pandoc Markdown, is the inclusion of the €[./file] construct, which recursively adds files to the project, making it more natural to include source-files or other markdown files. This does break a bit with the convention of Markdown being readable as just a textfile, but is included because Marka Markdown is intended to replace LaTeX and many LaTeX project are too big to conveniently exist as a single file. It also allows the inclusion of parts of source-code or other documents, which helps keep a single-source-of-truth workflow, where external data is not copied into the documentation manually, which can result in mismatches between the document version of data and the real data.

Building

Marka is set up to build via the Crystal build tool Shards, so a simple shards install && shards build should produce the binaries. There is also support for building via Nix, so a simple nix build will produce a derivation.