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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/markdown_rst.md')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/markdown_rst.md | 84 |
1 files changed, 84 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/markdown_rst.md b/doc/markdown_rst.md index 5fb3caefc..a374749cb 100644 --- a/doc/markdown_rst.md +++ b/doc/markdown_rst.md @@ -9,6 +9,8 @@ Nim-flavored Markdown and reStructuredText .. include:: rstcommon.rst .. contents:: +.. importdoc:: docgen.md + Both `Markdown`:idx: (md) and `reStructuredText`:idx: (RST) are markup languages whose goal is to typeset texts with complex structure, formatting and references using simple plaintext representation. @@ -110,6 +112,8 @@ Supported standard RST features: Additional Nim-specific features -------------------------------- +* referencing to definitions in external files, see + [Markup external referencing] section * directives: ``code-block`` \[cmp:Sphinx], ``title``, ``index`` \[cmp:Sphinx] * predefined roles @@ -170,6 +174,86 @@ Optional additional features, by default turned on: .. warning:: Using Nim-specific features can cause other RST implementations to fail on your document. +Referencing +=========== + +To be able to copy and share links Nim generates anchors for all +main document elements: + +* headlines (including document title) +* footnotes +* explicitly set anchors: RST internal cross-references and + inline internal targets +* Nim symbols (external referencing), see [Nim DocGen Tools Guide] for details. + +But direct use of those anchors have 2 problems: + +1. the anchors are usually mangled (e.g. spaces substituted to minus + signs, etc). +2. manual usage of anchors is not checked, so it's easy to get broken + links inside your project if e.g. spelling has changed for a heading + or you use a wrong relative path to your document. + +That's why Nim implementation has syntax for using +*original* labels for referencing. +Such referencing can be either local/internal or external: + +* Local referencing (inside any given file) is defined by + RST standard or Pandoc Markdown User guide. +* External (cross-document) referencing is a Nim-specific feature, + though it's not really different from local referencing by its syntax. + +Markup local referencing +------------------------ + +There are 2 syntax option available for referencing to objects +inside any given file, e.g. for headlines: + + Markdown RST + + Some headline Some headline + ============= ============= + + Ref. [Some headline] Ref. `Some headline`_ + + +Markup external referencing +--------------------------- + +The syntax is the same as for local referencing, but the anchors are +saved in ``.idx`` files, so one needs to generate them beforehand, +and they should be loaded by an `.. importdoc::` directive. +E.g. if we want to reference section "Some headline" in ``file1.md`` +from ``file2.md``, then ``file2.md`` may look like: + +``` +.. importdoc:: file1.md + +Ref. [Some headline] +``` + +```cmd +nim md2html --index:only file1.md # creates ``htmldocs/file1.idx`` +nim md2html file2.md # creates ``htmldocs/file2.html`` +``` + +To allow cross-references between any files in any order (especially, if +circular references are present), it's strongly reccommended +to make a run for creating all the indexes first: + +```cmd +nim md2html --index:only file1.md # creates ``htmldocs/file1.idx`` +nim md2html --index:only file2.md # creates ``htmldocs/file2.idx`` +nim md2html file1.md # creates ``htmldocs/file1.html`` +nim md2html file2.md # creates ``htmldocs/file2.html`` +``` + +and then one can freely reference any objects as if these 2 documents +are actually 1 file. + +Other +===== + Idiosyncrasies -------------- |