Things that I am thinking about or learning (either through reading or by school of hard knocks). These are my personal thoughts and not necessarily the positions or thoughts of any organization I am associated with.

1 minute read

I have been using MultiMarkdown for a while now. I use it for creating simple text files that I want to read in text mode but also want to perhaps “dress up” as either a HTML or PDF file (mostly the former).

Since it is text oriented, it is easy to use scripts to automate things into or within this format. Many of my UAB pages are built with it (I use a .mmd file extension) and I built an extensive set of scripts and processes for maintaining _ Region 3_ meeting agendas with the tool. I successfully turned this package over to the new Region 3 Secretary so there is now “user 2” for this automation.

The MultiMarkdown site has a good documentation as well as some files to download as examples. For my course web pages, I use a banner to provide breadcrumb like linkages to other parts of the university, my department, and my web site. This banner as well as the heading of one of my typical MultiMarkdown pages looks like

Title:        What Tools Do I Need?
Author:       David Green
Affiliation:  UAB
Date:         DATELM
Keywords:
Format:       complete
LaTeX XSLT:   article.xslt

[UAB][1] -> [ENG][2] -> [ [ECE][3] / [ECE Intranet][4] ] -> [ [DGreen][5] /
[DGreen Intranet][6] ] -> [EE448/548][7] -> TITLE

* * *

TITLE
=====

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nunc vestibulum facilisis
justo, eget tempor ligula accumsan nec. Proin dignissim fermentum scelerisque.
Donec scelerisque vehicula dui ac imperdiet. Integer est dolor, varius dapibus
ultricies a, facilisis sed tortor.

Fusce quis orci turpis, eget fringilla arcu.
Quisque a ligula a tellus commodo gravida dapibus nec massa. Fusce eu urna lacus,
ac molestie odio.

I use a script to process TITLE to match the title in the header as well as change the text DATELM to the present date. My script, after doing some substitutions like the ones described, calls the MultiMarkdown script mmd2XHTML which generates the web page.

By removing, the header through the TITLE (and its underline) lines, it can be processed using the MultiMarkdown script mmd2PDFXeLaTeX.pl to produce a nice looking PDF document.

Finally, I should note that many blogs (including tumblr.) accept Markdown formatting which is the initial motivation for the MultiMarkdown tools.

Update February 2020

Changed my web site server link.

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