mmark

Mmark: a powerful markdown processor in Go geared towards the IETF

483

title: “About”
date: 2018-07-22T14:05:51+01:00
aliases: [/about/]

Mmark is a powerful markdown processor written in Go, geared towards writing IETF documents. It is,
however, also suited for writing complete books and other technical documentation, like the
Learning Go book (mmark source, and
I-D text output).

Also see this repository on how to
write RFC using Markdown.

It provides an advanced markdown dialect that processes file(s) to produce internet-drafts in XML
RFC 7991 format. Mmark can produce xml2rfc (aforementioned
RFC 7991), HTML5 output, and manual pages.

Example RFCs in Mmark format can be found in the Github
repository.

Mmark uses gomarkdown which is a fork of
blackfriday. See its
README.md for more documentation.

Syntax

Mmark’s syntax and the extra features compared to plain Markdown are detailed in
syntax.md.

Mmark adds the following syntax elements to
gomarkdown/markdown:

(Extended) title block.
Special sections.
Including other files with the option to specify line ranges, regular
expressions and/or prefix each line with a string. By default only files on the same level, or
below are allowed to be included (see the -unsafe flag).
Document divisions.
Captions for code, tables and quotes
Asides.
Figures and Subfigures - bundle (sub)figures
into a larger figure.
Block Level Attributes that allow to specify attributes, classes and
IDs for elements.
Indices to mark an item (and/or a subitem) to be referenced in the document index.
Citations and adding XML References
In document cross references, short form of referencing a section in the
document.
Super- and Subscript.
Callouts in code and text.
BCP14 (RFC 2119) keyword detection.

Usage

You can download a binary or optionally build mmark
your self. You’ll need a working Go environment, then check out the code and:

% go get && go build
% ./mmark -version
2.0.0

To output XML2RFC v3 xml just give it a markdown file and:

% ./mmark rfc/3514.md

Making a draft in text form (v3 output)

% ./mmark rfc/3514.md > x.xml
% xml2rfc --v3 --text x.xml

Outputting HTML5 is done with the -html switch.

Files edited under Windows/Mac and using Windows style will be converted into Unix style line ending
before parsing. Any output from mmark will use Unix line endings.

Note there are no wrong markdown documents, so mmark will only warn about things that are not
right. This may result in invalid XML. Any warning from mmark are send to standard error, to see
and check for those you can discard standard output to just leave standard error: ./mmark rfc/3515.md > /dev/null.

Example RFC

The rfc/ directory contains a couple of example RFCs that can be build via v3 tool chain.
The build the text files, just run:

cd rfc
make txt

Official RFCs are in rfc/orig (so you can compare the text output from mmark).

Also See

Kramdown-rfc2629 is another tool to process markdown and
output XML2RFC XML.