Usage

Once this plugin is installed, just replace the plugin name simple with semiliterate in your mkdocs.yml file. It accepts all of the same parameters, so mkdocs will still work as before, and you will have immediate access to all of the following extensions. (Note that this documentation assumes a familiarity with the usage of the simple plugin.)

Inclusion syntax

While extracting content from a file (because it matches one of the semiliterate patterns, rather than just include), an unescaped expression of the form

{! FILENAME YAML !}

(which may span multiple lines) will trigger file inclusion. The FILENAME may be a bare word, in which case it cannot contain whitespace, or it may be enclosed in single or double quotes. Note that FILENAME is interpreted relative to the directory in which the file containing the {! .. !} expression resides. The YAML is interpreted exactly as the extraction options to a semiliterate item as documented for the simple extension, subject to the extensions below. The text extracted from FILENAME is interpolated at the current location in the file currently being written. Recursive inclusion is supported.

The simplest example of such an inclusion directive is just {! boilerplate.md !}, which (because of the conventions for extraction parameters) simply interpolates the entire contents of boilerplate.md at the current location.

For an example that uses more of the extraction parameters, the current version number of mkdocs-semiliterate is extracted into the Overview of this documentation via

{! setup.cfg { extract: {start: name}, terminate: '(\d*\.\d*\.\d*)', ensurelines: false} !}

to take advantage of the beginning of the setup.cfg file:

[metadata]
name = mkdocs-semiliterate
version = 0.8.3
description = Extension of mkdocs-simple-plugin adding easy content inclusion
...

(and of course both of the code snippets just above are extracted into this page with {! ... !}, as you can see in the source code for the plugin.)

Note that a {! ... !} directive must be in a line that semiliterate would normally copy. That is, semiliterate does not examine lines after the terminate regexp, or when no mode of extraction is active. It also doesn’t check any text written from lines that match these special expressions, including start and stop. Moreover, on such normally-transcribed lines, it’s the text after the application of any semiliterate replacements that is checked for {! ... !}.

Double-quoted filenames and special extraction

Standard Python escape sequences in double-quoted filenames are interpreted as usual; for example you can write

{! "snippet/Say \"Don\'t\"" !}

to include a file whose name (snippet/Say "Don't", in this case) has both double and single quotes.

Further, semiliterate supports some special escape sequences for doublequoted file names to include text from other places than current files in the project tree:

\git: extracts a version of a file from the Git archive of the project (presuming it is under Git version control) and then includes content from that file. For example, you could write

{! "\git 0.1.0:mkdocs.yml" extract: {start: '### install'} !}

to extract content starting after the ### install line from the mkdocs.yml file in the Git commit of this repository tagged 0.1.0. This feature is primarily useful if you are documenting the development or changes to a project over time, or are documenting a feature in a specific past release of your project, and want to be sure that material included in your documentation does not change as the project progresses. (This behavior is as opposed to the usual case, in which you want your documentation to incorporate the most up-to-date version of extracted content.)

The precise behavior for a FILENAME argument in a {! ... !} inclusion of the form

"\git SPECIFIER"

is that the output of git show SPECIFIER is written to a temporary file, and that file is extracted from.

\syspath: searches for the remainder of the doublequoted filename in the python sys.path and includes content from the found file. For example, you could write

{! "\syspath mkdocs/themes/readthedocs/base.html"
extract:
  replace: [ ['([<]body.*$)', '\1\n<p>Kilroy was here.</p>\n'] ]
!}

to create a version of the “base.html” of the “readthedocs” theme with additional content at the very top of the body. As the example suggests, this mechanism is primarily useful to tweak an mkdocs theme in ways not anticipated by the {%- block ... %} directives placed by the theme writer.

Additional plugin parameters

semiliterate adds a couple of new plugin parameters to further tailor its behavior as compared to simple. They are described in this section, with default values in parentheses at the beginning of each entry.

exclude

([‘.o’]) Files whose name contains a string in this list will not be processed by semiliterate, regardless of whether they might match include, the semiliterate patterns, or standard Markdown.

copy_standard_markdown

(False) Whether to add MkDocs’ list of standard Markdown extensions to the include parameter so that Markdown files will be directly copied to the docsite. Note that the simple behavior corresponds to a true value for copy_standard_markdown, but semiliterate still incorporates all standard Markdown files because of the following extract_standard_markdown parameter.

extract_standard_markdown

({}) If the enable key of this dict parameter is true (it defaults to the opposite of copy_standard_markdown), it adds a semiliterate block causing extraction (and hence include-directive processing) from all standard Markdown files (as defined by MkDocs). The remaining keys of this parameter are included as parameters of that semiliterate block. Thus, the default values of the parameters arrange for Markdown files to be copied “as-is”, except possibly for embedded inclusions. On the other hand, setting this parameter to {enable: false} (which is also the default when copy_standard_markdown is true) will prevent automatic extraction (and hence disable inclusion-directive processing) from standard Markdown files.

extract_on_copy

(False) Whether to also attempt extraction from a file that is copied verbatim (because of matching the include_extensions).

semiliterate.ensurelines

(true) Guarantees that a newline is trancribed for each line of the input, even if a start, stop, terminate, or replacement pattern would have suppressed the newline. Note this can be set separately for each block (i.e. filename pattern) within the semiliterate parameter. The default setting corresponds to the simple behavior, so setting this to “false” allows you to suppress newlines with judicious use of these patterns.

Adjusting the mkdocs theme

semiliterate also makes it possible to add generated files to the mkdocs theme. It does this by detecting if a theme.custom_dir parameter has been set in the mkdocs configuration, and if so, it adds the corresponding directory in the generated docs dir to the theme search path. (Note this means that files in the corresponding subdirectory of your project will be copied into the resulting doc site unless their names start with a ‘.’)