notes2web
View your notes as a static html site. Browse a live sample of it here.
Tested with pandoc v2.19.2.
Why?
I want to be able to view my notes in a more convenient way. I was already writing them in Pandoc markdown and could view them as PDFs but that wasn't quite doing it for me:
- It was inconvenient to flick through multiple files of notes to find the right PDF
- It was annoying to sync to my phone
- PDFs do not scale so they were hard to read on smaller screens
- Probably more reasons I can't think of right now
- Fun
Install
Other Things to Know
- notes2web indexes ATX-style headings for searching
- notes2web attempts to display file history through the
git logcommand - notes2web looks for the plaintext file
LICENSEin the root directory of your notes
Custom Directory Index
To add custom content to a directory index, put it in a file called index.md under the directory.
You can set the following frontmatter variables to customise the directory index of a directory:
| variable | default value | description |
|---|---|---|
tags |
[] |
list of tags, used by search and inherited by any notes and subdirectories |
uuid |
none | unique id to reference directory, used for permalinking |
content_after_search |
false |
show custom content in index.md after search bar and directory index |
automatic_index |
true |
show the automatically generated directory index. required for search bar to function. |
search_bar |
true |
show search bar to search directory items. requires automatic_index (enabled by default) |
Notes Metadata
notes2web reads the following YAML frontmatter variables for metadata:
| variable | description |
|---|---|
author |
The person(s) who wrote the article |
tags |
A YAML list of tags which the article relates to - this is used for browsing and also |
title |
The title of the article |
uuid |
A unique identifier used for permalinks. |
lecture_slides |
a list of paths pointing to lecture slides used while taking notes |
lecture_notes |
a list of paths pointing to other notes used while taking notes |
Permalinks
Permalinks are currently rather basic and requires JavaScript to be enabled on the local computer. In order to identify documents between file changes, a unique identifier is used to identify a file.
This unique identifier can be generated using the uuidgen command in the uuid-runtime package or
str(uuid.uuid()) in the uuid python package.
The included n2w_add_uuid.py will add a UUID to a markdown file which does not have a UUID in it
already.
Combine it with find to UUIDify all your markdown files (but make a backup first).
Custom Styling
To completely replace the existing styling, set the environment variable CSS_DIR to another directory with
a file called styles.css.
To add additional styling, the default styling will attempt to import styles.css from the root of the notes
directory.
CLI Usage
$ notes2web.py notes_directory
Output of notes2web.py --help:
TODO add cli output
The command will generate a website in the output-dir directory (./web by default).
It will then generate a list of all note files and put it in index.html.
Then you just have to point a webserver at output-dir.
Uninstall
# make uninstall
Acknowledgements
Default synatx highlighting is based off Pygments' default theme and made using Pandoc v2.7.2. I found the theme here.
Pretty sure the link colours are taken from thebestmotherfucking.website.