base64 –

Convert Markdown files to HTML5 or LaTeX or MOBI

↓ Version 0.1 - January 29, 2013

Introduction

base64 is a free cross platform command line utility which takes an input file formatted in the Markdown syntax and transforms the output to one of several formats. The output formats currently supported include HTML5, LaTeX & MOBI (via kindlegen). EPUB support is planned for the middle of 2013.

Developed as a .NET application it works natively under Windows, yet can run under Linux and Mac OS when used in conjunction with Mono.

Syntax

base64 is run from the Windows command line, supplying the input markdown file to convert followed by one or more options.

base64 input.md [options]

base64 can be run on Linux in a similar method, by using the Mono .NET implementation.

mono base64 input.md [options]

Example – convert the markdown file called manual.md to a LaTeX file called manual.tex

base64 manual.md -o="manual.tex" -f="LaTeX"

Options

Options with a single dash need the value to be enclosed in quotes like -o="output.html". All other options are supplied as stated as they either turn on or off the required effect.

Option	Description
-o, -output	The output file name, including full path.
-f -formats	The format of the output file values can be either HTML, LaTeX, MOBI or TXT).
-template	Insert the converted file into the supplied template.
-html-id-prefix	When converting to HTML, base64 adds id attributes to all heading tags (H1-H6). Use this option to prefix the auto generated id numbers.
--no-html-id	Turn off the automatic generation of id attributes on heading tags.
--gzip	When used in conjunction with the HTML parser, the resulting output file is compressed using the gzip algorithm. This allows the web page to be hosted on an Ningx server using pre-compressed content via the HttpGzipStaticModule. Alternatively, like this page, the file can be served pre-compressed from Amazon's S3 static hosting solution as long as an appropriate header is set.
--guid	Generate a globally unique identifier (GUID) for use in the Kindle and EPUB .opf files.

Downloads

version 0.1 – is still in private beta, but is being used to produce corporate documentation. The code is being reorganised so that it can be released as open source on bitbucket. The utility will be released under an MIT license when ready. If you are interested to know when the software is released please contact the author – contact@paulbradley.org. Alternatively subscribe to the change log RSS feed, which will announce when the initial version is ready.
version 0.0.4 – 29.01.2013 added guid option, fixed escaping of URL's being converted to LaTeX footnotes. HTML tags like <a name="loc"> are now converted to LaTeX label commands like \label{loc}.
version 0.0.3 – 16.01.2013 fixed escaping of the $ symbol in LaTeX output, … now converted to \ldots{} command, HTML abbreviations are now converted to LaTeX footnotes.
version 0.0.2 – 15.01.2013 added support to output the resulting HTML file as a compressed gzip file.
version 0.0.1 – 01.12.2012 initial release.

Why

My motivation for developing this tool will be explained shortly.