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literate

literate is a Go command line tool for generating readable program listings. It was inspired by Luke Gorries' post "Readable Programs" and, in particular, his pbook example. It works by treating all text that have a line comment as Markdown text, and putting code in code blocks.

Listings that are written to a file are written as <file.go>.<format>; for example, producing listings for listing.go:

  • markdown -> listing.go.md
  • HTML -> listing.go.html
  • PDF -> listing.go.pdf

Multiple languages are supported; for the list, pass the -l help flag to literate. literate is a simple tool that only recognises line comments right now; you can tell it what a line comment starts with and it will use that.

Examples

  • To produce an HTML listing for listing.go:

      literate -o html listing.go

    This will produce listing.go.html, which is a standalone page. The template for this page is contained in the html.go source file, and is taken from my site tyrfingr.

  • To produce a PDF listing for pandoc.go:

      literate -o pdf pandoc.go

    Similar to the previous example, this will produce the PDF file pandoc.go.pdf.

  • To produce a markdown listing for html.go and have this printed to standard output:

      literate html.go

    Or, alternatively,

      literate -o - html.go

  • You can produce listings for multiple files at the same time:

      literate -o pdf *.go

    If you ran this on the literate directory, you would have listing.go.pdf, html.go.pdf, pandoc.go.pdf, and texout.go.pdf.

Supported Output Formats

Standalone listings are generated; the following formats (selected with the -o flag) are supported:

  • html - generate HTML listing
  • latex - uses pandoc to convert the markdown to a LaTeX listing.
  • md - generate markdown listing
  • pdf - uses pandoc to convert the markdown to a PDF listing.
  • tex - rudimentary pure-Go TeX listing.

Dependencies

  • literate uses blackfriday for producing HTML from the listing. This will automatically be pulled in by go get.

  • pandoc is required for conversion to PDF.

Why?

Ultimately, I wanted a way to take notes while reading a book and have a way to extract better-looking notes from a source file while still retaining the ability to run the files. This program does (pretty much) just what I want it to, although block comments would be nice. Originally, I had golst, but wanted to be able to use it with Lisp and Haskell.

License

literate is released under an ISC license. For details, see LICENSE in the source repository.