Diml

Prototype Dictation Markup Language

Specification

A diml document provides a simple markup format for dictating notes in a way to preserve formatting for transformation to a presentable format (e.g. markdown). An example of DiML is below:

section. School Diary; heading. My First Day At School; point. I went to the lunch room; point. I went to the class room; point. I went to the nurse's room; heading. My Second Day At School; point. I went to the drama room; point. I went to the clown room;

Transcribes to:

# School Diary
## My First Day At School
* I went to the lunch room
* I went to the class room
* I went to the nurse's room
## My Second Day At School
* I went to the drama room
* I went to the clown room

As you can see the above document isn't formatted but has the necessary keyword to parse the content and organize it into the format desired. This is helpful in the case of transcription of hand written notes via dictation.

See originating idea here: https://github.com/aquaflamingo/random-ideas/issues/6

DiML document

A DiML document is a Tree data structure composed of n children with at most height of 3 organized in a hierarchy: Section > Heading > Point.

Each node in the tree must be one of these elements described below.

Example of a DiML document:

root/
├─ section/
│  ├─ heading/
│  │  ├─ point
│  ├─ heading 2/
│  │  ├─ point
├─ section 2/

Basic Elements

There are three basic elements to DiML:

1. Section: a content element for separating independent blocks of content in notes
2. Heading: a content element for separating themes for notes
3. Point: a content element for capturing a point in note notes

Sections

An individual .diml document can have 1 to n number of Section. Section cannot be children of other Sections. In other words, a Section can only be a siblings.

A Section can have 1 to n child Heading elements.

Headings

An individual Heading document can have 1 to n number of Point elements. Heading cannot be children of other Heading elements. In other words, a Heading elements can only be a siblings.

A Heading can have 1 to n child Point elements.

Points

A Point can only be a child under a Heading.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'diml'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install diml

Usage

Assuming you have a .diml file according to the specification, you can copy the example of parsing diml to markdown in the example file:

ruby examples/parse_md.rb -f examples/easy.diml

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/diml.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.