alexxnica / spec-md

📖 Additions to Markdown for writing specification documents

Spec Markdown

Renders Markdown with some additions into an HTML format commonly used for writing technical specification documents. Markdown additions include code syntax highlighting, edit annotations, and the definition of algorithms and grammar productions.

Philosophy

Spec Markdown is first and foremost Markdown. As such, it follows Markdown's philosophy of intending to be as easy to read and easy to write as is feasible.

In order to interoperate with other tools which use Markdown, Spec Markdown tries to add as little additional syntax as possible, instead preferring conventions. This means any documents written with Spec Markdown in mind should render adequately by other Markdown renderers.

To support the rendering additions of Spec Markdown, some features of Markdown may be limited or removed. As an example, Spec Markdown is strict about the order and locations of headers in a document.

Note: This is not a normative spec for Spec Markdown, but just documentation of this tool. It is also very much a work in progress.

Getting Started

To use Spec Markdown, just write Markdown files. There are some conventions used by Spec Markdown which you can read about in Spec additions.

To convert your Markdown files into an HTML spec document, use the spec-md utility.

npm install -g spec-md
spec-md ./path/to/markdown.md > ./path/to/output.html

You can also require spec-md as a node module.

npm install --save-dev spec-md

var fs = require('fs');
var specMarkdown = require('spec-md');
specMarkdown.html('./path/to/markdown.md').then(function (html) {
  fs.writeFile('./path/to/output.html', html);
});

Don't forget to copy CSS files from this library's css/ directory.

Spec Markdown also provides utilities for generating and operating on an intermediate representation of the markdown, which you can explore in Using Spec Markdown.

Markdown

Spec additions

Using Spec Markdown

Contributing