Argot 0.5.2

argot text markup -- a markdown dialect

Argot is a small set of extensions on the markdown markup language designed primarily for writing technical blog entries. The extensions are not “proper” markdown extensions; they are implemented as preprocessors that compile down into markdown or html syntax. In addition to markdown’s regular syntax, which argot does not interfere with, argot provides these features:

• moin-style highlighted code blocks

• link target processors

You can fork argot from its hg repository.

requirements

argot requires markdown, pygments, and lxml. lxml can be difficult to install from pypi, so it is not listed as an installation requirement in setup.py. Please fulfill this requirement through lxml’s OS bundles.

moin-style highlighted code blocks

In markdown, code blocks are blocks of text one level of indentation removed from the body text. However, when dealing with more primative browser input mechanisms, indenting lots of text can be problematic (as tab often shifts input focus). In addition to allowing for this convention, argot implements moin/tracwiki style code blocks that feature syntax highlighting via pygments.

syntax

The general syntax is ‘{{{’ followed by an optional shebang and desired pygments parser, followed by your code block, and bookended with ‘}}}’:

{{{#!parser
    ... code ...
}}}

By default, if no parser is provided, argot uses pygments to try and guess what language is being used. It falls back to the plain text lexer.

link target processors

Markdown links are in the style of [link text](url), but this will often interrupt writing with digging around for urls that might be complex or even unknown. Rather than linking to urls, argot allows you to encode the target information in customizable ways.

syntax

Link processors are made up of the processor tag, followed by a colon, followed by a query for that processor. For example:

[Quick reStructured Text](google: restructured text quick ref)

This calls the link processor google with the query restructured text quick ref. By default, only the link processor google is enabled. There is an amazon link processor that can be enabled, but it is suggested that for stable queries you append ‘amazon’ to google queries.

writing new link processors

Link processors are functions that take a single argument, the query as a string, and return another string:

def wiki_processor(query):
    return google_processor('wikipedia %s' % query)
argot.enable_link_processor(wiki_processor)

This hypothetical wiki processor merely does a google search for ‘wikipedia’ and the query provided. The tag for the processor can be provided in 3 ways:

• the name of the function before the first underscore

• a tag attribute on the function

• an optional second argument to enable_link_processor