prodockit 0.4.0

A family of extensions for Zensical needed for professional and academic documentation: section cross-references, bibliography/citation handling, a glossary, a Pandoc/WeasyPrint PDF pipeline, and Jinja macros for word counts and reference-style spacing

prodockit

A family of extensions for Zensical needed for professional and academic documentation: section cross-references, bibliography/citation handling, a glossary, and a Pandoc/WeasyPrint PDF pipeline for the downloadable, submittable document these usually need alongside the website itself.

Most of prodockit is Python-Markdown extensions, enabled in zensical.toml. prodockit.pdf is a command-line tool instead (prodockit pdf), since a PDF build pipeline isn't a Markdown syntax extension - it reads the same zensical.toml too. In addition, there's a set of website macros (prodockit.zensical_macros) to help use prodockit's features.

It's a kit for professional documentation, built on Zensical's own Markdown and Pandoc/WeasyPrint PDF pipeline.

Status: early, but functional - prodockit.headings, prodockit.refs, prodockit.citations, prodockit.glossary, prodockit.tables, prodockit.bibliography, prodockit.pdf, and prodockit.zensical_macros are implemented and tested.

Full documentation

Installation

pip install prodockit

Extensions

Extension	Description
prodockit.headings	Gives every heading an id and a hierarchical section number ("1", "1.1", "1.2", "2", ...).
prodockit.refs	\ref{id} section cross-references, resolving to the target's current number - similar in spirit to LaTeX's \ref.
prodockit.citations	Define a source once, cite it by key anywhere with \cite{id} - auto-generates the bracketed, linked citation text.
prodockit.glossary	Define a term once (an acronym expansion, a glossary entry), insert it by id anywhere with \gls{id} - similar in spirit to LaTeX's glossaries package.
prodockit.tables	Percentage or fixed column widths on a table, via a width attribute already attachable to a header cell with attr_list.
prodockit.bibliography	An alternative to prodockit.citations: define sources in a BibTeX/BibLaTeX .bib file and format \cite{id}/the reference list in any Citation Style Language style, via Pandoc's own --citeproc.

import markdown

html = markdown.markdown(
    text,
    extensions=[
        "attr_list", "prodockit.headings", "prodockit.refs", "prodockit.citations", "prodockit.glossary"
    ],
)

# Introduction {: #intro }

See \ref{intro} for background.\cite{skou2023} This uses \gls{css}.

Skoulikari, A. (2023) *Learning Git*.
{: #skou2023 data-cite-text="Skoulikari, 2023" }

**CSS** - Cascading Style Sheets.
{: #css data-term="CSS" }

\ref{intro} resolves to a link reading 1 - the heading's current section number; \cite{skou2023} resolves to [Skoulikari, 2023], linked to that source; \gls{css} resolves to CSS, linked to its own definition. All three stay correct if content is reordered, since resolution happens fresh on every conversion. See the docs for options, multi-page registry sharing, and full syntax details.

PDF generation

prodockit.pdf builds a standalone PDF from your site, via Pandoc and WeasyPrint (both need to be installed separately - see the docs). No Python required - it reads the same zensical.toml your site already has:

prodockit pdf

That's it - run it from your project root and it builds a complete PDF, table of contents included, from every page in your nav. Also handles a table too wide for a portrait page - printed sideways, on its own landscape page(s), spanning multiple pages with a repeated heading row - and {.web-only}/{.pdf-only} markers for content that should only appear in one of the two outputs. See the docs for the zensical.toml settings it reads, and for the Python API (build_pdf(), prodockit.pdf.html/.lua/.css/.icons/.mermaid/.rotate) if you're scripting your own build pipeline instead.

Website macros

prodockit.zensical_macros provides a site-wide word count, the git-detected repository URL, chapter/ appendix numbering that continues across pages, and reference/acronym/ glossary spacing that matches prodockit.pdf's own PDF output - as Jinja variables/macros for Zensical's own macros plugin:

[project.markdown_extensions.zensical.extensions.macros]
modules = ["prodockit.zensical_macros"]

See the docs for the full variable/macro list.

Development

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

zensical is a core dependency, so zensical serve is available as soon as prodockit is installed - no extra step needed to build the documentation locally.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.