Docbat is a simple javascript utility which takes coverts several file types to html pages. This is useful for build scripts where you want to able to just browse a directory and have see the same content as a README.md but don't have a markdown viewer installed (say as a browser extension).

Docbat provides methods to add formatting to the HTML page such as custom CSS or other constructs after the markdown conversion so that the HTML isn't just raw. Docbat's default options provide simple margins and padding for reasonable view across desktop and mobile device contexts.

Simple Usage:

npx docbat -i inputfile.md -o outputfile.html 

if the -l parameter is included all libraries will be embedded in the page as a single stand alone file with support for code syntax higlighting.

npx docbat -i inputfile.md -o outputfile.html -l

Supported input file types:

• Markdown
• raw text
• tab delimited text (also see examples for adding titles)
• images (no processing is performed on the images)

Supported output:

• HTML page (with default headers / titles which are overridable)
• HTML raw (just HTML which can then be chained / piped together)
• HTML-JSON - as a JSON construct (this leverages the bitwrench.js library, see that library for more details on npm or github)
• proper formatting, including syntax highlighting for code blocks (via higlight.js)

Future: Docbat exposes the following file distribution libraries:

• docbat.js - ES5 / browser library for doing all operations.
• docbat.mjs - ES6 module (uses export/import otherwise same as docbat.js)
• docbat-cli.js - commandline program for scriptting operations

Usage at Commandline

simple usage to convert markdown to html

./docbat-cli.js -i myfile.md -o myoutput.html

type docbat --help for more commandline options

simple usage to convert markdown to pdf

./docbat-cli.js -i myfile.md -o myoutput.pdf -p true

Code Syntax Support

Code syntax highlighting is supported. Here is a Javascript example:

let addTwoNumbers = function(a,b) { return a+ b}

const myObject = {
   "one": "this is it,
   2: [1,2,3,4,5],
   3: { "an embedded object": "I am a js object!", 8 : "eight"}
}

and here is python

"""
Simple python code example
"""
#import myLibrary
def addTwoNumbers(a,b)
  return a+b

Usage as a library

Dependencies (only important if building from source)

docbat uses the nodejs javscript runtime along with some packages which are available via the npmjs javascript packaging service.

Technologies:

• nodejs javascript runtime - nodejs
• npm - package manager javascript packages - npm

Key Packages:

• showdown.js for markdown parsing - showdown.js
• bitwrench.js for page formatting duties - bitwrench
• command-line-args for argument processing - command-line-args.js

For buildings from Source:

• webpack and webpackcli
• del-cli

For Testing: *

Source code home

all source is at github:
docbat on github

Linting

docbat uses eslint for static code checking and analysis.

npm install eslint --save-dev

./node_modules/.bin/eslint --init

Now run the lint test like this:

./node_modules/.bin/eslint docbat.js   

Release History

• 0.91 Initial release
• 0.94 added pdf output support

License

docbat is released under the OSI Approved FreeBSD 2-clause license