TeXmacs markdown plugin

This plugin is a (for now one-way) converter to markdown format for TeXmacs. It supports most of the standard Markdown syntax, plus much of TeXmacs' non-dynamic markup. In particular, labels and references, numbered environments and figures should work out of the box. The major exception are tables, but as a workaround the plugin offers the possibility of exporting them as html into the markdown file.

The plugin has been developed for its use in two specific websites, Paperwhy and appliedAI's TransferLab, and can use multiple extensions specific to the static website generator Hugo. There might still be some code very specific to those sites, YMMV.

Setup

Clone this repository into your ~/.TeXmacs/plugins directory as markdown and checkout the master branch. For Linux / OSX this is:

git clone -b master https://github.com/texmacs/markdown.git 
~/.TeXmacs/plugins/markdown

For Windows, the path (usually?) is

\Users\YourUser\AppData\Roaming\TeXmacs\plugins

Preferences

You can activate the plugin menu with Tools -> Markdown plugin. In it you will find a convenient Export… action, as well as all configurable preferences:

• Flavour: As of version 0.5.3 this is either Hugo or vanilla.
• Paragraph width: number of columns at which to wrap text in the generated output. Set it to an empty value to deactivate wrapping.
• Numbered sections? Whether to prepend section numbers to numbered section titles.
• Export on save? Whether to automatically export the document overwriting the last exported markdown file, every time the TeXmacs buffer is saved. The path to the exported file is stored in the document's auxiliary data either as a relative or an absolute path with respect to the document. Relative can be useful e.g. if the document is shared.

Features

Additional TeXmacs macros

Use the style package markdown.ts with Document -> Style -> Add package -> Markdown -> markdown to enable:

• Support for alternate image formats between TeXmacs and markdown via <md-alt-image|tm-image|md-image>. This is useful e.g. to provide SVG and EPS/PDF versions of images for print and web respectively. The same effect can be achieved with <specific|markdown|…> and <specific|texmacs|…>.

• Macros for labels in equation arrays. Using positioning tricks with <htab> results in LaTeX code that MathJax does not support, namely \hfill. For this reason, we provide two macros <eqnarray-lab|lab> and <eqnarray-lab\*|lab> which allow positioning of equation labels to the right in equation arrays. The first one also adds a <label|eq:lab> to be used in the document as <reference|eq:lab>, note the prefix eq:.

  Symbols (e.g. $\Delta$ or $\star$) are not supported for these labels as of v0.6.1 of the plugin.

Extensions to vanilla markdown

Besides standard Markdown, this plugin supports the following:

• Footnotes (and marginal notes, exported as footnotes for vanilla markdown).
• Links to equations and equation arrays. Labels are exported as HTML <span> with identifiers sanitized and custom CSS. See extensions/tmmarkdown.css.
• Most standard environments, both numbered and unnumbered. Localized and with support for references and <smart-ref>.
• Numbered and unnumbered sections.
• Nested lists and styles applied to environments.

Hugo support

In addition to the above, almost everything that Hugo supports can be converted from TeXmacs, including setting frontmatter values and extensions like footnotes and striked through text.

Use the style package hugo.ts with Document -> Style -> Add package -> Markdown -> hugo to enable:

• All of the markdown extensions above
• Setting of values for the frontmatter. With <hugo-front> one can input any number of key|value pairs as arguments, one argument each. That is: insert the tag <hugo-front>, then use structured insert right to add two arguments and use the first for the key and the second for the value. Repeat as needed. It is possible to use strings, booleans (true, false) or dates (insert with <date>). Additionally, the macro <pdf-name> inserts the name of the file with .pdf appended. To enter a list, input <tuple> as the value and use structured insert right to add items. To input a dictionary, use <dict> and again use structured insert to create tuples of key|value.

Supported shortcodes

All custom shortcodes are in extensions/hugo/.

• Figures are converted to {{< figure >}}.
• For arbitrary shortcodes, use <hugo-short>, e.g. <hugo-short|toc> for {{< toc >}}. In order to pass named arguments, use <hugo-short|shortcode-name|argname1|argvalue1|…>. For positional arguments, replace the argument names by #f as in <hugo-short|shortcode-name|#f|posvalue1|#f|posvalue2|…>.
• Citations using <cite> and <cite-detail> (of any arity) are automatically detected and converted to {{< cite ref >}}, and all of them are gathered in the frontmatter as well, for indization by Hugo's taxonomy system. The rendering of bibliography is done by {{< references >}}.
• Marginal notes and figures are converted to {{< sidenote >}} and {{< sidefigure >}}.

Known issues

For an up-to date list, see the issue tracker in GitHub.

• The converter can break with malformed or unexpected input, like markup inside tags whose values should be strings (although many cases are “handled”).
• Error reporting is rather lacking. Run TeXmacs in a console to see stack traces and such in case you are running into problems.
• EPS and PDF images are not supported by browsers. As a workaround allowing to have both, use <md-alt-image> in package markdown.ts as explained above. The first argument is for TeXmacs and the second one for the markdown export.
• The converter supports only one style. For instance all environments have emphasized bodies and bold names, <section> is exported as h1, etc.

License

GPL v3.