% Rippledoc % John Gabriele % 2018-08

A particularly easy-to-use doc processing tool.

Rippledoc is a command-line program that uses Pandoc to generate easily-navigable HTML from a bunch of Markdown-formatted text files (it ripples down into subdirectories looking for .md files).

That is, it turns:

doc/
    index.md
    changes.md
    getting-started.md
    examples/
        ex-1.md
        ex-2.md

into:

doc/
    index.md
    index.html
    changes.md
    changes.html
    styles.css  # <-- additionally created by Rippledoc
    toc.conf    # <-- additionally created by Rippledoc
    getting-started.md
    getting-started.html
    examples/
        ex-1.md
        ex-1.html
        ex-2.md
        ex-2.html
        toc.conf  # <-- additionally created by Rippledoc

(You can, optionally, omit the ./index.md file and instead use a ../README.md if you prefer.)

Rippledoc requires nearly zero configuration; you just run it in a directory containing Markdown-formatted text files (see more info for the few rules you've got to follow) and it does the rest.

Find the full Rippledoc docs rendered in lovely html at http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/sw/rippledoc/index.html. The source is located at https://gitlab.com/uvtc/rippledoc.

Under the hood, Rippledoc uses Pandoc to do the markdown ➞ html conversion.

The main goals for Rippledoc are:

• make it as easy as possible to create, write, and manage nice-looking, ordered, easily-navigable docs
• make it as easy as possible for others to contribute to your docs
• not tie you to any one particular doc processing tool (including this one)

The author has not given even a passing thought to running this program on any OS other than GNU/Linux.

cd path/to/my-project
touch README.md
cd doc
touch _copyright getting-started.md  # tutorial.md, changes.md, ...
# Edit those files, then run Rippledoc, telling it to use ../README.md.
rippledoc.py --readme-is-index

and point your browser to file:///path/to/my-project/doc/index.html to see the results.

Of course, this site you're reading now was generated using Rippledoc.

To upload your docs to a server, you might use rsync:

rsync -urv --delete /path/to/your-proj/doc you@remote:public_html/your-proj

That will put the local doc directory into the remote your-proj directory.

Copyright 2014–2018 John Gabriele

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.