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Description:

previewmarkup 0.3.3

The preview-markup program takes a text file with lightweight markup
(Markdown and reStructuredText are supported) and shows a live preview of the
markup rendered to HTML in your web browser. When you save your text file the
preview is automatically updated within a couple of seconds. That’s all there
is to it!

Installation

Required system packages

Getting started
Future improvements
Why this project?

Similar projects

Contact
License

Installation
The preview-markup program is written in Python and is available on PyPI
which means installation should be as simple as:
$ pip install preview-markup
There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per
user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing
system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so
if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these
instructions ;-).

Required system packages
The preview-markup program uses the Misaka package for Markdown parsing
because it’s compatible with GitHub Flavored Markdown. This may require you to
ensure that the libffi development files are installed before you attempt to
install preview-markup. On Debian and Ubuntu based systems this can be
accomplished as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install libffi-dev

Getting started
To get started you simply run the command preview-markup. If you give it a
filename as an argument then that file will be previewed, otherwise the
README.md or README.rst file in the current working directory is
previewed.
If you want to run preview-markup in the background then you probably won’t
appreciate the logging to the terminal that is enabled by default. In this case
I suggest you use the following command line:
$ preview-markup -q &
The -q is short for --quiet and the & instructs your shell to run
the program in the background. If you want to kill the program later on just
run the fg command (this will bring the program back to the foreground) and
then press Control-C (this will kill the program).

Future improvements
Some random ideas for future improvements (I may implement these as time
permits or when I feel like programming but don’t feel like picking up one of
my many other projects):

Automatically close orphaned windows
When the command line program is terminated the browser window or tab page
that was previously opened should be closed automatically. This can probably
be implemented using a JavaScript call to the server to check if the server is
still alive, if not then just call window.close().

Instant updates instead of meta refresh
Right now there’s a hard coded 10 second meta refresh in the HTML template. It
would be a lot more elegant if the server used inotify or something similar to
instantly detect changes and push those to the browser client. For now the
meta refresh achieves the main goal though :-).

Why this project?
Different variations of preview-markup have lived in my private dotfiles
repository for years now (I track ~/bin in my dotfiles repository). Over
those years the program has had several names and very similar yet slightly
different purposes. By the time I decided to clean up these “variations on a
similar theme” I was using several different shell and Python scripts working
together to do the same things that preview-markup now does. I decided to
merge, cleanup, document and publish that mess of Python and shell scripts for
multiple reasons:

I wanted to merge all of the features that I’d grown to appreciate into a
single coherent piece of software that was easy and intuitive to use (and
written in Python so I could more easily maintain it :-).
I wanted to manage the installation of that software as a Python package
with properly specified dependencies where a single pip install was
enough to get things going.
Last but not least: Given the effort I’d already put into it, it seemed a
shame not to share my work with the world.

Similar projects
I created preview-markup because I couldn’t find a tool that provided live
previews of Markdown and reStructuredText markup and just because it was
fun to work on, however this is clearly an itch that dozens of developers have
scratched over the years :-). Here are some similar projects that I’ve run
into and/or used in the past:

restview
Live preview of reStructuredText files. A personal favorite of mine, simple
and sweet, does exactly what is promises. Written in Python.

grip
Provides local previews of Markdown files exactly as GitHub renders them by
using the GitHub API to render the Markdown to HTML. Written in Python.

markdown-live
Live preview of Markdown files. Written in JavaScript (using Node.js).

github-markdown-preview
Live preview of Markdown files. Makes it an explicit goal to render things
just like GitHub does. Written in Ruby.

Contact
The latest version of preview-markup is available on PyPI and GitHub. For
bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions,
suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.

License
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2018 Peter Odding.