Modular, Versioned Documentation

(pronounciation of MoVeDo is in Italian)

A build tool for your Markdown based, git hosted documentation. Think of it like gradle, leiningen, maven, grunt, or any other build tool that mainly relies on convention (over configuration) – but for your documentation.

By default it:

[GFM]: https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown/)

The main idea behind MoVeDo is:

Write your documentation in standard Markdown on git; nothing more.

Though it also optionally supports pre-processing, it is discouraged, and it is applied in a way that makes the output digestible by any (locally executed) tool, for further processing/generating docs in other formats.

It wants you to not worry about how the documents are post-processed that much, but rather on using standard formats an idioms. That way of thinking nudges one to keep it simple, using only basic Markdown syntax, whenever possible.

This allows anyone working on the docs to use their preferred tool for editing, previewing and even post-processing into distributable document formats. It also allows for easy switching between post-processing tools, like pandoc, jekyll, hugo*, vuepress (vue.js)*, docsify* or whatever tool that supports Markdown as sources; no additional requirements.

(*Not yet supported)

It might also make one think twice or three times, before using Markdown extensions supported only by “this tool” or “that platform”. If it manages to do only that, it met its highest goal, as this leads to more social thinking, both for fellow co-workers and the community as a whole.

MoVeDo does mainly two things:

  1. Converting Markdown (tree of files) -> HTML (tree of files)
  2. Converting Markdown (tree of files) -> PDF (single, linear file)

The first part (HTML) is almost entirely out-sourced to a 3rd party tool of your choice, while the second is mostly MoVeDo code and pandoc.

So apart from choosing MoVeDo, you should also choose a Markdown to HTML converter. If you don’t, MoVeDo uses plain pandoc, which will not result in the most pretty results. To see which Markdown to HTML converters are currently supported by MoVeDo, run ls -1 movedo/scripts/make_html_* from your project root.

As of October 2021, this are:

Please raise an issue if you need support for an other tool, or make a pull request.

Further Reading

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