Title : Madoko Author : Daan Leijen

Madoko -- a Fast Scholarly Markdown Processor

Madoko is a fast javascript Markdown processor written in Koka It started out as a demo program for the new, strongly typed, Koka language and the name comes from "Ma/rk/do/wn in Ko/ka".

Madoko can both be run local as a command-line program, or as a full online experience on Madoko.net with storage and collaboration through dropbox or github.

Using Madoko

The best experience is online at: https://www.madoko.net

Otherwise, you can run Madoko on the command line:

• Ensure you have Node.js installed on your system.

• Open a command line window and run the Node package manager to install Madoko:

  npm install madoko -g

and you are done. Translating a markdown document is done simply as:

• madoko -v mydoc.mdk

which generates mydoc.html. The -v flag gives more verbose output. To also generate a PDF file, use:

• madoko --pdf -vv --odir=out mydoc

where --odir puts all output files in the out directory. To generate a PDF, you need to have LaTeX installed on your system, which is also required for mathematics and bibliographies. We recommend the full TeXLive LaTeX system as it is available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX, and is used on the Madoko.net server as well.

Madoko philosophy

The main design goal of Madoko is to enable light-weight creation of high-quality scholarly and industrial documents for the web and print, while maintaining John Gruber's Markdown philosophy of simplicity and focus on plain text readability.

The popularity of Markdown is not accidental, and it is great for writing prose: it is super simple and straightforward to create good looking HTML documents. But for more serious use Markdown falls short in several areas, and Madoko provides many essential additions for larger documents.

Besides HTML output, Madoko also generates high-quality PDF files through LaTeX. Even though more Markdown implementations support this, there has been a lot of effort in Madoko to make the LaTeX generation robust and customizable. This makes it possible to write high-quality articles using just Madoko and get both a high-quality print format (PDF) and a good looking HTML page.

For more information look at the Madoko manual

Have fun, -- Daan