Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous.
Ultimate goal: destroy the currently grossly inefficient education system and replace it with a much more inspiring system where people learn what they want as fast as possible to reach their goals faster without so much useless pain.
How to get there: create a website (live at OurBigBook.com) that incentivizes learners (notably university students taking courses) to write freely licensed university-level natural science books in their own words for free. Their motivation for doing that are:
getting their knowledge globally recognized and thus better jobs
topics: groups the articles of different users about the same topic, sorted by upvote to achieve mind melding/collective intelligence. This makes your articles easier for others to find.
as HTML files to a static website: you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
This allows you to add arbitrary comments to your tags explaining them as the need arises.
infinitely deep table of contents: never again be limited to only 6 levels of HTML h6 legacy limitations! With OurBigBook, the sky is the limit!
Furthermore, with our dynamic article tree of OurBigBook Web, every header can be the toplevel header for better SEO and user experience e.g. both the following pages show all their ancestors:
Every single section has a clear and sane discussion area, where you can easily ask the author for clarifications and corrections, and where other readers can find answers to their problems in older existing discussions.
cirosantilli.com: showcase static demo document with interesting content, published with OurBigBook CLI. Primary inspiration for OurBigBook development.
All donated money currently just goes directly to Ciro Santilli's personal bank account, the project founder and current lead. If things ever take off we will set up a legal entity to make things cleaner. One may dream. But for now, it would just add unnecessary overhead. Related: Section "Project governance".
Ciro announces funding milestones and transparently accounts for all donations at: cirosantilli.com/sponsor. When milestones are reached, he quits his day job and works full time on the project for a given amount of time.
We are also happy to discuss paid contracts to implement specific features, to get in touch see: contact.
The following sections cover different ways to use tools from the OurBigBook:
OurBigBook Web user manual: manual for OurBigBook Web, the dynamic website. With this approach, you can write content on the browser without downloading anything, and save it on our database.
OurBigBook is a bit like a Wikipedia where each person can have their own version of every article.
This addresses the main shortcomings of Wikipedia:
contributors are not clearly recognized for their contributions. Clearly knowing who wrote what, and having upvotes and reputation is an essential motivation mechanism for free knowledge contributors.
what you write can be deleted at any time, for two major reasons:
excessive notability guidelines
the requirement for "encyclopedic tone", which precludes in theory tutorials
If you spend four hours writing a tutorial for a website and it gets deleted without comment, you are never ever going to write everything for that website again.
In OurBigBook, you can write about whatever you want, and no one can delete it.
inconsistent page granularity: it is somewhat random if an article deserves to be a toplevel page, or only a subheader. With OurBigBook, every header is a toplevel page with the dynamic article tree feature.
they give clear recognition to users' contributions
they make it much less likely that your content will be deleted by others (though it can still happen sometimes)
The limitation of Stack Exchange is that you cannot write a book on it, and anything judged to be "too general" will be closed or deleted. In other words, it can only contain the smallest units of knowledge, and lacks a table of content mechanism to group knowledge together more broadly.
Therefore, while it basically perfectly solves "shallower subjects" such as computer programming, it is insufficient for "deeper" subjects with longer dependency chains of knowledge such as mathematics and physics.
To a large extent, the goal of OurBigBook is to combine the strengths of Stack Exchange with those of Wikipedia.
OurBigBook is quite similar to the now defunct Knol, a Google project that basically made a Wiki where each person can have their own version of each article.
Knol ran from 2008 until its shutdown in 2012, and failed to attract enough attention that Google would keep it running.
It is our belief however that the website had great promise and potential value, and simply would generate profits too small to compare with other Google projects.
Knol also lacks a mechanism to store your notes locally, which we believe is essential if you want to get people to use as a system for people to dump large chunks into.
The main distinguishing feature of OurBigBook from other scientific publishing methods is mind-melding via topics.
It is perfectly possible to use OurBigBook without ever targeting mind meld, and we want to make that use case as awesome as we can.
There are many methods for people to publish their scientific knowledge online, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but we believe that mind-melding is essential for a project to be able to truly take off.
OurBigBook seeks to pick the best of each of those methods, while also adding the mild-melding aspect on top, which we believe to be so transformative.
--embed-includes single file output from multiple input files. Includes are parsed smartly, not just source copy pasted, e.g. included headers are shifted from h1 to h2 correctly.
On the previous sample filesystem, it would produce a single output file index.html which would contain a header structure like:
= My website
== h2
=== Not index
==== Not index h2
supports both local serverless rendering to HTML files for local viewing, and server oriented rendering such as GitHub pages, e.g. internal links automatically get .html extension and or not. E.g.:
locally, a link \x[not-index] would render as <a href="not-index.html"> and not-index.bigb produces not-index.html
when publishing, \x[not-index] would render as <a href="not-index"> and not-index.bigb also produces not-index.html, which the server converts to just http://my-website.com/not-index
cross file configuration files to factor out common page parts like headers, footers and other metadata, e.g.:
the table of contents for index.html also contains the headers for not-index.bigb producing:
My website
h2
Not index
Not index h2
This means that you can split large splitDefault input files if rendering starts to slow you down, and things will still render exactly the same.
check that local files and images linked to actually exist: \aexternal argument. E.g.:
\a[i-don-exist.txt]
would lead to a build error.
associate headers to files or directories with the \Hfile argument e.g.:
Here's an example of a nice image: \x[path/to/my/image.png]{file}.
= path/to/my/image.png
{file}
This image was taken when I was on vacation!
would automatically add a preview of the image on the output. Display files and their metadata nicely directly on your static website rather than relying exclusively on GitHub as a file browser.
= Furry animal
I like \x[furry-animal]{p}, especially my cat, here is his photo: \x[image-my-cat].
== Cat
\Image[My_cat.jpg]
{title=My cat}
scopes either with directories or with within a single file:
See the important conclusion of my experiment: \x[report-of-my-experiment/conclusion]
= Report of my experiment
{scope}
== Introduction
== Middle
== Conclusion
My favorite fruits are \x[apple-fruit]{p}!
My favorite least favorite brand is is \x[apple-company]! \x[apple] computers are too expensive.
== Apple
{disambiguate=fruit}
== Apple
{c}
{disambiguate=company}
= Apple
{c}
{synonym}
OurBigBook tries to deal with media such as images and video intelligently for you, e.g.: Section "Where to store images". E.g. you can keep media in a separate media repository, my-media-repository, and then by configuring on ourbigbook.json:
OurBigBook is designed entirely to allow writing complex professional HTML and PDF scientific books, blogs, articles and encyclopedias.
OurBigBook aims to be the ultimate LaTeX "killer", allowing books to be finally published as either HTML or PDF painlessly (LaTeX being only a backend to PDF generation).
It aims to be more powerful and saner and than Markdown and Asciidoctor.
Originally, OurBigBook was is meant to be both saner and more powerful than Markdown and Asciidoctor.
But alas, as Ciro started implementing and using it, he started to bring some Markdown insanity he missed back in.
And so this "degraded" slightly into a language slightly saner than Asciidoctor but with an amazing Node.js implementation that makes it better for book writing and website publishing.
Notably, we hope that our escaping will be a bit saner backslash escapes everything instead of Asciidoctor's "different escapes for every case" approach: github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/901
But hopefully, having starting from a saner point will still produce a saner end result, e.g. there are sane constructs for every insane one.
It is intended that this will be an acceptable downside as OurBigBook will be used primarily large complex content such as books rather than forum posts, and will therefore primarily written either:
in text editors locally, where users have more features than in random browser textareas
[ and ]: left and right curly braces bracket to start an optional arguments
and double blank newlines for paragraphs if you are pedantic, but this later degenerated into many more with insane macro shortcuts.
We would like to have only square brackets for both optional and mandatory to have even less magic characters, but that would make the language difficult to parse for computer and humans. LaTeX was right for once!
This produces a very regular syntax that is easy to learn, including doing:
arbitrary nesting of elements
adding arbitrary properties to elements
This sanity also makes the end tail learning curve of the endless edge cases found in Markdown and Asciidoctor disappear.
The language is designed to be philosophically isomorphic to HTML to:
further reduce the learning curve
ensure that most of HTML constructs can be reached, including arbitrary nesting
More precisely:
macro names map to tag names, e.g.: \\a to <a
one of the arguments of macros, maps to the content of the HTML element, and the others map to attributes.
E.g., in a link:
\a[http://example.com][Link text\]
the first macro argument:
http://example.com
maps to the href of <a, and the second macro argument:
The high sanity of OurBigBook, also makes creating new macro extensions extremely easy and intuitive.
All built-in language features use the exact same API as new extensions, which ensures that the extension API is sane forever.
Markdown is clearly missing many key features such as block attributes and internal links, and has no standardized extension mechanism.
The "more powerful than Asciidoctor" part is only partially true, since Asciidoctor is very featureful can do basically anything through extensions.
The difference is mostly that OurBigBook is completely and entirely focused on making amazing scientific books, and so will have key features for that application out-of-the box, notably:
amazing header/ToC/ID features including proper error reports: never have a internal broken link or duplicate ID again
and we feel that some of those features have required specialized code that could not be easily implemented as a standalone macro.
Another advantage over Asciidoctor is that the reference implementation of OurBigBook is in JavaScript, and can therefore be used on browser live preview out of the box. Asciidoctor does Transpile to JS with Opal, but who wants to deal with that layer of complexity?
Static wiki generators: this is perhaps the best way of classifying this project :-)
github.com/gollum/gollum: already has a local server editor! But no WYSIWYG nor live preview. Git integration by default, so when you save on the UI already generates a Git commit. We could achieve that with: github.com/isomorphic-git/isomorphic-git, would be really nice. Does not appear to have built-in static generation:
typst: github.com/typst/typst An attempt at a LaTeX killer. Has its own typesetting engine, does not simply transpile to LaTeX. Meant to be faster and simpler to write. No HTML output as of writing: github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
Less related but of interest, similar philosophy to what Ciro wants, but no explicitly reusable system:
Ciro Santilli developed OurBigBook to perfectly satisfy his writing style, which is basically "create one humongous document where you document everything you know about a subject so everyone can understand it, and just keep adding to it".
cirosantilli.com is the first major document that he has created in OurBigBook.
He decided to finally create this new system after having repeatedly facing limitations of Asciidoctor which were ignored/wontfixed upstream, because Ciro's writing style is not as common/targeted by Asciidoctor.
Following large documents Ciro worked extensively on:
the need for -S, --split-headers to avoid one too large HTML output that will never get indexed properly by search engines, and takes a few seconds to load on any browser, which is unacceptable user experience
As shown at <image Cute chicken chick>, chicks are cute.
\Image[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/H%C3%BChnerk%C3%BCken_02.jpg/800px-H%C3%BChnerk%C3%BCken_02.jpg?20200716091201]
{title=Cute chicken chick}
\Video[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_fl4xoGTKU]
{title=Top Down 2D Continuous Game by Ciro Santilli (2018)}
Images can take a bunch of options, about which you can read more about at image arguments. Most should be self explanatory, here is an image with a bunch of useful arguments:
\Image[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/H%C3%BChnerk%C3%BCken_02.jpg/800px-H%C3%BChnerk%C3%BCken_02.jpg?20200716091201]
{title=Ultra cute chicken chick}
{description=
The chicken is yellow, and the hand is brown.
The background is green.
}
{border}
{height=400}
{source=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H%C3%BChnerk%C3%BCken_02.jpg}
Note that the prefixes http:// and https:// are automatically removed from the displayed link, since they are so common that they woudly simply add noise.
Equivalent sane version:
The website \a[http://example.com] is cool.
\Q[\a[http://example.com/2]]
Trump said this and that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_tape#Trump's_responses{ref}https://web.archive.org/web/20161007210105/https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/statement-from-donald-j.-trump{ref} Then he said that and this.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_tape#Trump's_responses{ref}https://web.archive.org/web/20161007210105/https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/statement-from-donald-j.-trump{ref}
If it doesn't work, it should be easy to make it work, as we use relative links almost everywhere already. Likely there would only be some minor fixes to the --template arguments.
An external link is a link that points to a resource that is not present in the current OurBigBook project sources. A typical external link is something like:
Internal path links are links that point to files present inside the current project. For example, in computer programming tutorials we will often want to refer to source files in the current directory. So from our index.bigb, we could want to write something like:
Have a look at this amazing source file: \a[index.js].
which renders as:
Have a look at this amazing source file: index.js.
and here \a[ourbigbook] is a internal link. These should not to be confused with internal links, which may point not only to files, but to any ID, e.g. of headers inside a OurBigBook file.
OurBigBook considers a link external by default if it does not have a URL with protocol.
Therefore, the following links are external by default:
the correct relative path to the file is used when using nested scopes with -S, --split-headers. For example, if we have:
= h1
== h2
{scope}
=== h3
\a[index.js]
then in split header mode, h3 will be rendered to h2/h3.html.
Therefore, if we didn't do anything about it, the link to index.js would render as href="index.js" and thus point to h2/index.js instead of the correct index.js.
Instead, OurBigBook automatically converts it to the correct href="../index.js"
The _dir directory tree contains file listings of files in the _raw directory.
We originally wanted to place these listings under _raw itself, but this leads to unsolvable conflicts when there are files called index.html present vs the index.
The reason why a _raw prefix is needed it to avoid naming conflicts with OurBigBook outputs, e.g. suppose we had the files:
configure
configure.bigb
Then, in a server that omits the .html extension, if we didn't have _raw/ both configure.html and configure would be present under /configure. With _raw we instead get:
A URL with protocol is a URL that matches the regular expression ^[a-zA-Z]+://. The following are examples of URLs with protocol:
http://cirosantilli.com
https://cirosantilli.com
file:///etc/fstab
ftp://cirosantilli.com
The following aren't:
index.js
../index.js
path/to/index.js
/path/to/index.js
//example.com/path/to/index.js. This one is a bit tricky. Web browsers would consider this as a protocol-relative URL, which technically implies a protocol, although that protocol would be different depending how you are viewing the file, e.g. locally through file:// vs on a with website https://.
For simplicity's sake, we just consider it as a URL without protocol.
Note that the http://example.com inside \a[http://example.com] only works because we do some post-processing magic that prevents its expansion, otherwise the link would expand twice:
OurBigBook automatically encodes all link href for characters that are not recommended for URLs.
This way you can for example simply write arbitrary Unicode URLs and OurBigBook will escape them for you on the HTML output.
The only exception for this is the percent sign itself %, which it leaves untouched so that explicitly encoded URLs also work. So if you want a literal percent then you have to explicitly write it yourself as %25.
* acute a Á as raw Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Á
* acute a Á explicitly escaped by user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81
There is basically just one application for line breaks: poetry, which would be too ugly with code blocks due to fixed width font:
Even as the sun with purple-coloured face
Had taken his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheeked Adonis tried him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor begins to woo him.
"Thrice fairer than myself," thus she began,
The field's chief flower, sweet above compare,
Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves or roses are;
Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.
which renders as:
Even as the sun with purple-coloured face Had taken his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheeked Adonis tried him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor begins to woo him.
"Thrice fairer than myself," thus she began, The field's chief flower, sweet above compare, Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves or roses are; Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.
Inline code (code that should appear in the middle of a paragraph rather than on its own line) is done with a single backtick (`) insane macro shortcut:
My inline `x = 'hello\n'` is awesome.
which renders as:
My inline x = 'hello\n' is awesome.
and block code (code that should appear on their own line) is done with two or more backticks (``):
``
f() {
return 'hello\n';
}
``
which renders as:
f() {
return 'hello\n';
}
The sane version of inline code is a lower case c:
My inline \c[[x = 'hello\n']] is awesome.
which renders as:
My inline x = 'hello\n' is awesome.
and the sane version of block math is with an upper case C:
\C[[
f() {
return 'hello\n';
}
]]
which renders as:
f() {
return 'hello\n';
}
The capital vs lower case theme is also used in other elements, see: block vs inline macros.
If the content of the sane code block has many characters that you would need to escape, you will often want to use literal arguments, which work just like the do for any other argument. For example:
\C[[[
A paragraph.
\C[[
And now, some long, long code, with lots
of chars that you would need to escape:
\ [ ] { }
]]
A paragraph.
]]]
which renders as:
A paragraph.
\C[[
And now, some long, long code, with lots
of chars that you would need to escape:
\ [ ] { }
]]
A paragraph.
Note that the initial newline is skipped automatically in code blocks, just as for any other element, due to: argument leading newline removal, so you don't have to worry about it.
The distinction between inline \c and block \C code blocks is needed because in HTML, pre cannot go inside P.
We could have chosen to do some magic to differentiate between them, e.g. checking if the block is the only element in a paragraph, but we decided not to do that to keep the language saner.
See the: <code Python hello world>.
``
print("Hello wrold")
``
{title=Python hello world}
{description=Note thow this is super short unlike the C hello world!}
There is no limit to how many levels we can have, for either sane or insane headers!
HTML is randomly limited to h6, so OurBigBook just renders higher levels as an h6 with a data-level attribute to indicate the actual level for possible CSS styling:
<h6 data-level="7">My title</h6>
The recommended style is to use insane headers up to h6, and then move to sane one for higher levels though, otherwise it becomes very hard to count the = signs.
To avoid this, we considered making the insane syntax be instead:
= 1 My h1
= 2 My h2
= 3 My h3
but it just didn't feel as good, and is a bit harder to type than just smashing = n times for lower levels, which is the most common use case. So we just copied markdown.
The very first header of a document can be of any level, although we highly recommend your document to start with a \H[1], and to contain exactly just one \H[1], as this has implications such as:
When the OurBigBook input comes from a file (and not e.g. stdin), the default ID of the first header in the document is derived from the basename of the OurBigBook input source file rather than from its title.
The only exception to this is the home article, where the ID is empty.
For example, in file named my-file.bigb which contains:
= Awesome ourbigbook file
the ID of the header is my-file rather than awesome-ourbigbook-file. See also: automatic ID from title.
If the file is an index file other than the toplevel index file, then the basename of the parent directory is used instead, e.g. the toplevel ID of a file:
my-subdir/index.bigb
would be:
#my-subdir
rather than:
#index.bigb
For the toplevel index file however, the ID is just taken from the header itself as usual. This is done because you often can't general control the directory name of a project.
For example, a GitHub pages root directory must be named as <username>.github.io. And users may need to rename directories to avoid naming conflicts.
TODO: we kind of wanted this to be the ID of the toplevel header instead of the first header, but this would require an extra postprocessing pass (to determine if the first header is toplevel or not), which might affect performance, so we are not doing it right now.
This multiple argument marks given IDs as being children of the current page.
The effect is the same as adding the \xchild argument argument to an under the header. Notably, such marked target IDs will show up on the autogenerated tagged metadata section.
This argument is deprecated in favor of the \Htag argument.
Example:
= Animal
== Mammal
=== Bat
=== Cat
== Wasp
== Flying animal
{child=bat}
{child=wasp}
\x[bat]
\x[wasp]
renders exactly as:
= Animal
== Mammal
=== Bat
=== Cat
== Wasp
== Flying animal
\x[bat]{child}
\x[wasp]{child}
The header child syntax is generally preferred because at some point while editing the content of the header, you might accidentally remove mentions to e.g. \x[bat]{child}, and then the relationship would be lost.
If given, the current section contains metadata about file or other resource with the given URL.
If empty, the URL of the file is extracted directly from the header. Otherwise, the given URL is used.
for example:
= path/to/myfile.c
{file}
An explanation of what this file is about.
renders a bit like:
= path/to/myfile.c
{id=_file/path/to/myfile.c}
An explanation of what this file is about.
\a[path/to/myfile.c]
``
// Contents of path/to/myfile.c
int main() {
return 1;
}
``
_file/path/to/myfile.c: the metadata about that file. Note that locally the .html extension is added as in file/path/to/myfile.c.html which avoids the collision. But on a server deployment, the .html is not present, and there would be a conflict if we didn't add that file/ prefix.
a link to the is added automatically, since users won't be able to click it from the header, as clicking on the header will just link to the header itself
a preview is added. The type of preview is chosen as follows:
if the URL has an image extension, do an image preview
otherwise if the URL has a video extension, or is a YouTube URL, do a video preview
otherwise, don't show a preview, as we don't know anything sensible to show
In some cases however, especially when dealing with external URLs, we might want to have a more human readable title with a non empty file argument:
The video \x[tank-man-by-cnn-1989] is very useful.
= Tank Man by CNN (1989)
{c}
{file=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU}
An explanation of what this video is about.
which renders something like:
The video \x[tank-man-by-cnn-1989] is very useful.
= Tank Man by CNN (1989)
{id=_file/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU}
\Video[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU]
An explanation of what this video is about.
= myfile.txt
{file}
Description of my amazing file.
and it would be associated to the file:
path/to/myfile.txt
The content of the header = myfile.txt is arbitrary, as it can be fully inferenced from the file path _file/path/to/myfile.txt.bigb. TODO add linting for it. Perhaps we should make adding a header be optional and auto-generate that header instead. But having at least an optional header is good as a way of being able to set header properties like tags.
This is a central source file that basically contains all the functionality of the OurBigBook Library, so basically the OurBigBook Markup-to-whatever (e.g. HTML) conversion code, including parsing and rendering.
Things that are not there are things that only use markup conversion, e.g.:
However, for documents with a very large number of sections, or deeply nested headers those numbers start to be more noise than anything else, especially in the table of contents and you are better off just referring to IDs. E.g. imagine:
1.3.1.4.5.1345.3.2.1. Some deep level
When documents reach this type of scope, you can disable numbering with the numbered option.
This option can be set on any header, and it is inherited by all descendants.
The option only affects descendants.
E.g., if in the above example turn numbering off at h2:
= Huge toplevel wiki
{numbered=0}
== h2
=== A specific tutorial
{numbered}
{scope}
==== h4
===== h5
then it renders something like:
= Huge toplevel wiki
Table of contents
* h2
* A specific tutorial
* 1. h4
* 1.1. h5
== h2
=== A specific tutorial
==== 1. h4
===== 1.1. h5
Note how in this case the number for h4 is just 1. rather than 1.1.1.. We only show numberings relative to the first non-numbered header, because the 1.1. wouldn't be very meaningful otherwise.
In addition to the basic way of specifying header levels with an explicit level number as mentioned at Section "Header (\H)", OurBigBook also supports a more indirect ID-based mechanism with the parent argument of the \H element.
We hightly recommend using parent for all but the most trivial documents.
For example, the following fixed level syntax:
= My h1
== My h2 1
== My h2 2
=== My h3 2 1
is equivalent to the following ID-based version:
= My h1
= My h2 1
{parent=my-h1}
= My h2 2
{parent=my-h1}
= My h3 2 1
{parent=my-h2-h}
The main advantages of this syntax are felt when you have a huge document with very large header depths. In that case:
it becomes easy to get levels wrong with so many large level numbers to deal with. It is much harder to get an ID wrong.
when you want to move headers around to improve organization, things are quite painful without a refactoring tool (which we intend to provide in the browser editor with preview), as you need to fix up the levels of every single header.
If you are using the ID-based syntax however, you only have to move the chunk of headers, and change the parent argument of a single top-level header being moved.
Note that when the parent= argument is given, the header level must be 1, otherwise OurBigBook assumes that something is weird and gives an error. E.g. the following gives an error:
= My h1
== My h2
{parent=my-h1}
because the second header has level 2 instead of the required = My h2.
When scopes are involved, the rules are the same as those of internal reference resolution, including the leading / to break out of the scope in case of conflicts.
Like the \Hchild argument, parent also performs ID target from title on the argument, allowing you to use the original spaces and capitalization in the target as in:
When mixing both \Hparent argument and scopes, things get a bit complicated, because when writing or parsing, we have to first determine the parent header before resolving scopes.
As a result, the follow simple rules are used:
start from the last header of the highest level
check if the {parent=XXX} is a suffix of its ID
if not, proceed to the next smaller level, and so on, until a suffix is found
Following those rules for example, a file tmp.bigb:
Arguably, the language would be even saner if we did:
\H[My h1][
Paragraph.
\H[My h2][]
]
rather than having explicit levels as in \H[1][My h1] and so on.
But we chose not to do it like most markups available because it leads to too many nesting levels, and hard to determine where you are without tooling.
Ciro later "invented" (?) \Hparent argument, which he feels reaches the perfect balance between the advantages of those two options.
In some use cases, the sections under a section describe inseparable parts of something.
For example, when documenting an experiment you executed, you will generally want an "Introduction", then a "Materials" section, and then a "Results" section for every experiment.
On their own, those sections don't make much sense: they are always referred to in the context of the given experiment.
The problem is then how to get unique IDs for those sections.
One solution, would be to manually add the experiment ID as prefix to every subsection, as in:
= Experiments
See: \x[full-and-unique-experiment-name/materials]
== Introduction
== Full and unique experiment name
=== Introduction
{id=full-and-unique-experiment-name/introduction}
See our awesome results: \x[full-and-unique-experiment-name/results]
For a more general introduction to all experiments, see: \x[introduction].
=== Materials
{id=full-and-unique-experiment-name/materials}
=== Results
{id=full-and-unique-experiment-name/results}
but this would be very tedious.
To keep those IDs shorter, OurBigBook provides the scopeboolean argument property of headers, which works analogously to C++ namespaces with the header IDs.
Using scope, the previous example could be written more succinctly as:
= Experiments
See: \x[full-and-unique-experiment-name/materials]
== Introduction
== Full and unique experiment name
{scope}
=== Introduction
See our awesome results: \x[results]
For a more general introduction to all experiments, see: \x[/introduction].
=== Materials
=== Results
Note how:
full IDs are automatically prefixed by the parent scopes prefixed and joined with a slash /
we can refer to other IDs withing the current scope without duplicating the scope. E.g. \x[results] in the example already refers to the ID full-and-unique-experiment-name/materials
to refer to an ID outside of the scope and avoid name conflicts with IDs inside of the current scope, we start a reference with a slash /
So in the example above, \x[/introduction] refers to the ID introduction, and not full-and-unique-experiment-name/introduction.
When nested scopes are involved, internal links resolution peels off the scopes one by one trying to find the closes match, e.g. the following works as expected:
= h1
{scope}
== h2
{scope}
=== h3
{scope}
\x[h2]
Here OurBigBook:
first tries to loop for an h1/h2/h3/h2, since h1/h2/h3 is the current scope, but that ID does not exist
so it removes the h3 from the current scope, and looks for h1/h2/h2, which is still not found
then it removes the h2, leading to h1/h2, and that one is found, and therefore is taken
the split header becomes the default, e.g. index.html is now the split one, and nosplit.html is the non-split one
the header it is given for, and all of its descendant headers will use the split header as the default internal cross target, unless the header is already rendered in the current page. This does not propagate across includes however.
For example, consider index.bigb:
= Toplevel
{splitDefault}
\x[h2][toplevel to h2]
\x[notindex][toplevel to notindex]
\Include[notindex]
== h2
and notindex.bigb:
= Notindex
\x[h2][notindex to h2]
\x[notindex][notindex to notindex h2]
== Notindex h2
Then the following links would be generated:
index.html: split version of index.bigb, i.e. does not contain h2
toplevel to h2: h2.html. Links to the split version of h2, since h2 is also affected by the splitDefault of its parent, and therefore links to it use the split version by default
toplevel to notindex: notindex.html. Links to non-split version of notindex.html since that header is not splitDefault, because splitDefault does not propagate across includes
nosplit.html non-split version of index.bigb, i.e. contains h2
toplevel to h2: #h2, because even though h2 is splitDefault, that header is already present in the current page, so it would be pointless to reload the split one
toplevel to notindex: notindex.html
h2.html split version of h2 from index.bigb
notindex.html: non-split version of notindex.bigb
notindex to h2: h2.html, because h2 is splitDefault
notindex to notindex h2: #notindex-h2
notindex-split.html: split version of notindex.bigb
notindex to h2: h2.html, because h2 is splitDefault
notindex to notindex h2: notindex.html#notindex-h2, because notindex-h2 is not splitDefault
The major application of this if you like work with a huge index.bigb containing thousands of random small topics.
Splitting those into separate source files would be quite laborious, as it would require duplicating IDs on the filename, and setting up includes.
However, after this index reaches a certain size, page loads start becoming annoyingly slow, even despite already loading large assets like images video videos only on hover or click: the annoying slowness comes from the loading of the HTML itself before the browser can jump to the ID.
And even worse: this index corresponds to the main index page of the website, which will make what a large number of users will see be that slowness.
Therefore, once this index reaches a certain size, you can add the splitDefault attribute to it, to make things smoother for readers.
And if you have a smaller, more self-contained, and highly valuable tutorial such as cirosantilli.com/x86-paging, you can just split that into a separate .bigb source file.
This way, any links into the smaller tutorial will show the entire page as generally desired.
And any links from the tutorial, back to the main massive index will link back to split versions, leading to fast loads.
Note that this huge index style is not recommended however. Ciro Santilli used to do it, but moved away from it. The currently recommended approach is to manually create not too large subtrees in each page. This way, readers can easily view several nearby sections without having to load a new page every time.
Therefore, without a custom suffix, the split header version of that header would go to docs.ourbigbook.com, which would collide with this documentation, that is present in a separate repository: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook.
Therefore a splitSuffix property is used, making the split header version fall under /ourbigbook-split, and leaving the nicer /ourbigbook for the more important project toplevel.
If given on the the toplevel headers, which normally gets a suffix by default to differentiate from the non-split version, it replaces the default -split suffix with a custom one.
If a non-toplevel macro has the title argument is present but no explicit id argument is given, an Element ID is created automatically from the title, by applying the following transformations:
do a id output format conversion on the title to remove for example any HTML tags that would be present in the conversion output
convert all characters to lowercase. This uses JavaScript case conversion. Note that this does convert non-ASCII characters to lowercase, e.g. É to é.
This conversion type is similar to Automatic ID from title, but it is used in certain cases where we are targeting IDs rather than setting them, notably:
Unlike \Htitle2 argument, the synonym does not show up by default next to the title. This is because we sometimes want that, and sometimes not. To make the title appear, you can simply add an empty title2 argument to the synonym header as in:
Note how we added the synonym to the title only when it is not just a simple flexion variant, since Quantum computing (Quantum computer) would be kind of useless would be kind of useless.
So here we see that Bat and Humming bird have their unique position in the tree under Mammal ane Bird. But we also wanted them to be somehow classified under Flying animal. Tags allow us to do that.
Or in other words: the toplevel header of each source file gets {toplevel} set implicitly for it by default.
This design choice might change some day. Arguably, the most awesome setup is on in which source files and outputs are completely decoupled. OurBigBook Web also essentially wants this, as ideally we want to store one source per header there in each DB entry. We shall see.
Also note that Wikipedia subsections are not completely stable, so generally you would rather want to link to a permalink with a full URL as in:
= Artificial general intelligence
{wiki=https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Artificial_general_intelligence&oldid=1192191193#Tests_for_human-level_AGI}
Note that in this case escaping the # is not necessary because it is part of the insanelink that starts at https://.
To the left of table of content entries you can click on an open/close icon to toggle the visibility of different levels of the table of contents.
The main use case covered by the expansion algorithm is as follows:
the page starts with all nodes open to facilitate Ctrl + F queries
if you click on a node in that sate, you close all its children, to get a summarized overview of the contents
if you click one of those children, it opens only its own children, so you can interactively continue exploring the tree
The exact behaviour is:
the clicked node is open:
state 1 all children are closed. Action: open all children recursively, which puts us in state 2
state 2: not all children are closed. Action close all children, which puts us in state 1. This gives a good overview of the children, without any children of children getting in the way.
state 3: the clicked node is closed (not showing any children). Action: open it to show all direct children, but not further descendants (i.e. close those children). This puts us in state 1.
Note that those rules make it impossible to close a node by clicking on it, the only way to close a node os to click on its parent, the state transitions are:
3 -> 1
1 -> 2
2 -> 1
but we feel that it is worth it to do things like this to cover the main use case described above without having to add two buttons per entry.
Clicking on the link from a header up to the table of contents also automatically opens up the node for you in case it had been previously closed manually.
OurBigBook adds some header metadata to the toplevel header at the bottom of each page. This section describes this metadata.
Although the table of contents has a macro to specify its placement, it is also automatically placed at the bottom of the page, and could be considered a header metadata section.
Used to represent a thematic break between paragraph-level elements:
She pressed the button. Just like that, everything was over.
\Hr
The next morning was a gloomy one. Nobody said a word.
which renders as:
She pressed the button. Just like that, everything was over.
The next morning was a gloomy one. Nobody said a word.
This macro corresponds to a misfeature of HTML/Markdown, and is not encouraged. We instead recommend creating smaller more specific headers instead to split sections, as this has all the usual advantages of allowing metadata to be associated to the header, such as -S, --split-headers, topic, liked and discussions.
Have a look at this amazing image: \x[image-my-test-image].
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{title=The title of my image}
{id=image-my-test-image}
{width=600}
{height=200}
{source=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tianasquare.jpg}
{description=The description of my image.}
title: analogous to the \Htitle argument. Shows up preeminently, and sets a default ID if one is not given. It is recommended that you don't add a period . to it, as that would show in internal links
This works because full is the default internal link style for Image, otherwise the link text would be empty since there is no title, and OurBigBook would raise an error.
OurBigBook can optionally deduce the title from the basename of the src argument if the titleFromSrcboolean argument is given, or if title-from-src is set as the default media provider for the media type:
Have a look at this amazing image: \x[image-tank-man-standing-in-front-of-some-tanks].
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{titleFromSrc}
If the image does not have an ID nor title, then it gets an automatically generated ID, just like every other OurBigBook output HTML element, and it is possible for readers to link to that ID on the rendered version, e.g. as:
#_123
Note that the 123 is not linked to the Figure <number>., but just a sequential ID that runs over all elements.
This type of ID is of course not stable across document revisions however, since if an image is added before that one, the link will break. So give an ID or title for anything that you expect users to link to.
Also, it is not possible to link to such images with an internal link, like any other OurBigBook element with autogenerated temporary IDs.
Another issue to consider is that in paged output formats like PDF, the image could float away from the text that refers to the image, so you basically always want to refer to image by ID, and not just by saying "the following image".
We can also see that such an image does not increment the Figure count:
If the image has any visible metadata such as source or description however, then the caption does show and the Figure count gets incremented:
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]{source=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tianasquare.jpg}
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]{description=This is the description of my image.}
If you are making a limited repository that will not have a ton of images, then you can get away with simply git tracking your images in the main repository.
With this setup, no further action is needed. For example, with a file structure of:
However, if you are making a huge tutorial, which can have a huge undefined number of images (i.e. any scientific book), then you likely don't want to git track your images in the git repository.
but OurBigBook allows you use configurations that allow you to enter just the image basename: Fundamental_theorem_of_calculus_topic_page_arrow_to_full_article.png which we will cover next.
In order to get this to work, the recommended repository setup is:
The directory and repository names are not mandatory, but if you place media in data/media and name its repository by adding the *-media suffix, then ourbigbook will handle everything for you without any further configuration in media-providers.
This particular documentation repository does have a different setup as can be seen from its ourbigbook.json. Then, when everything is setup correctly, we can refer to images simply as:
In this example, we also needed to set {provider=github} explicitly since it was not set as the default image provider in our ourbigbook.json. In most projects however, all of your images will be in the default repository, so this won't be needed.
provider must not be given when a full URL is given because we automatically detect providers from URLs, e.g.:
TODO implement: ourbigbook will even automatically add and push used images in the my-tutorial-media repository for you during publishing!
You should then use the following rules inside my-tutorial-media:
give every file a very descriptive and unique name as a full English sentence
never ever delete any files, nor change their content, unless it is an improvement in format that does change the information contained of the image TODO link to nice Wikimedia Commons guideline page
This way, even though the repositories are not fully in sync, anyone who clones the latest version of the *-media directory will be able to view any version of the main repository.
Then, if one day the media repository ever blows up GitHub's limit, you can just migrate the images to another image server that allows arbitrary basenames, e.g. AWS, and just configure your project to use that new media base URL with the media-providers option.
The reason why images should be kept in a separate repository is that images are hundreds or thousands of times larger than hand written text.
This is likely the sanest approach possible, as it clearly specifies which media version matches which repository version through the submodule link.
Furthermore, it is possible to make the submodule clone completely optional by setting things up as follows. For your OurBigBook project yourname/myproject create a yourname/myproject-media with the media, and track it as a submodule under yourname/myproject/media.
Now, as mentioned at media-providers, everything will work beautifully:
ourbigbook . local conversion will use images from media/ if it exists, e.g.:
\Image[myimage.jpg]
will render media/myimage.jpg. So after cloning the submodule, you will be able to see the images on the rendered pages without an internet connection.
But if the submodule is not cloned, not problem, renders will detect that and automatically use GitHub images.
Then, when you do:
ourbigbook --publish
the following happen:
\Image[myimage.jpg] uses the GitHub URL
automatically push media/ to GitHub in case there were any updates
also, that directory is automatically gitignore, so it won't be pushed as part of the main render and thus duplicate things
OurBigBook likes Wikimedia Commons so much that we automatically parse the image URL and if it is from Wikimedia Commons, automatically deduce the source for you. So the above image renders the same without the source argument:
And like for non-Wikimedia images, you can automatically generate a title from the src by setting the titleFromSrcboolean argument or if title-from-src is set as the default media provider for the media type:
but you don't want to do that for the most commonly Wikimedia Commons used license of CC BY+, do you? :-)
Upsides of using Wikimedia Commons for your images:
makes it easier for other writers to find and reuse your images
automatically generates resized versions of the uploaded images into several common dimensions so you can pick the smallest one that fits your desired image height to reduce bandwidth usage
if you have so many images that they would blow even the size of a separate media repository, this will still work
Downsides:
forces you to use the Creative Commons license
requires the content to be educational in nature
uploading a bunch of images to Wikimedia Commons does feel a bit more laborious than it should because you have to write down so much repeated metadata for them
And as a result, many many many SVG online images that you might want to reuse just rely on white pages and don't add that background rectangle.
Therefore for now we just force white background on our default CSS of block images, which is what most SVGs will work with. Otherwise, you can lose the entire image to our default black background.
For inline images however, a white background would also be very distracting compared to the nearby inline text, and it would prevent the use case of making rounded smileys, so for now we are just not forcing the background color in that case.
At some point we might just add a color argument to set the background color to an arbitrary value so that authors can decide what is better for each image.
TODO implement: mechanism where you enter a textual description of the image inside the code body, and it then converts to an image, adds to the -media repo and pushes all automatically. Start with dot.
Adds a border around the image. This can be useful to make it clearer where images start and end when the image background color is the same as the background color of the OurBigBook document.
\Image[logo.svg]
{border}
{height=150}
{title=Logo of the OurBigBook Project with a border around it}
The description argument similar to the image title argument argument, but allows allowing longer explanations without them appearing in internal links to the image.
For example, consider:
See this image: \x[image-description-argument-test-1].
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{title=Tank man standing in front of some tanks}
{id=image-description-argument-test-1}
{description=Note how the tanks are green.}
{source=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tianasquare.jpg}
In this example, the reference \x[image-description-argument-test-1] expands just to
Tank man standing in front of some tanks
and does not include the description, which only shows on the image.
The description can be as large as you like. If it gets really large however, you might want to consider moving the image to its own header to keep things slightly saner. This will be especially true after we eventually do: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/180.
If the description contains any element that would take its own separate line, like multiple paragraphs or a list, we automatically add a line grouping the description with the corresponding image to make that clearer, otherwise it can be hard to know which title corresponds to a far away image. Example with multiple paragraphs:
Stuff before the image.
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{title=Tank man standing in front of some tanks}
{id=image-description-argument-test-2}
{source=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tianasquare.jpg}
{description=Note how the tanks are green.
But the shirt is white.}
Stuff after the image description.
By default, we fix image heights to height=315, and let the width be calculated proportionally once the image loads. We therefore ignore the actual image size. This is done to:
prevent reflows as the page loads images and can determine their actual sizes, especially is the user opens the page at a given ID in the middle of the page
create a more uniform media experience by default, unless a custom image size is actually needed e.g. if the image needs to be larger
When the viewport is narrow enough, mobile CSS takes over and forces block images to fill 100% of the page width instead, removing the scrollbar.
Inline images on the other hand never get a horizontal scrollbar, they are just always capped at viewport width.
When the height argument is given, it changes that default height. Width is still just calculated proportionally to this new custom height.
Usage of this argument is generally discouraged, as we always set the default image height by default, so that also passing a width is either unnecessary or may lead to changes in the image's correct aspect ratio.
The \Include macro allows including an external OurBigBook headers under the current header.
It exists to allow optional single page HTML output while still retaining the ability to:
split up large input files into multiple files to make renders faster during document development
suggest an optional custom output split with one HTML output per OurBigBook input, in order to avoid extremely large HTML pages which could be slow to load
\Include takes one mandatory argument: the ID of the section to be included, much like internal links.
Headers of the included document are automatically shifted to match the level of the child of the level where they are being included.
If --embed-includes is given, the external document is rendered embedded into the current document directly, essentially as if the source had been copy pasted (except for small corrections such as the header offsets).
Otherwise, the following effects happen:
The headers of the included tree appear in the table of contents of the document as links to the corresponding external files.
This is implemented simply by reading a previously generated database file much like cross file internal link internals, which avoids the slowdown of parsing all included files every time.
As a result, you have to do an initial parse of all files in the project to extract their headers however, just as you would need to do when linking to those headers.
the include itself renders as a link to the included document
The insaner version is a bit insaner because the \Include magically discards the following newline node that follows it if it just a plaintext node containing exactly a newline. With a double newline, the newline would already have been previously taken out on the lexing stage as part of a paragraph.
This is the case because without the explicit container in an implicit ul list, the arguments would stick to the last list item instead of the list itself.
It is also required if you want ordered lists:
\Ol[
\L[first]
\L[second]
\L[third]
]
which renders as:
first
second
third
Insane nested list with two space indentation:
* a
* a1
* a2
* a2
* b
* c
which renders as:
a
a1
a2
a2
b
c
The indentation must always be exactly equal to two spaces, anything else leads to errors or unintended output.
Equivalent saner nested lists with implicit containers:
\L[
a
\L[a1]
\L[a2]
\L[a2]
]
\L[b]
\L[c]
which renders as:
a
a1
a2
a2
b
c
Insane list item with a paragraph inside of it:
* a
* I have
Multiple paragraphs.
* And
* also
* a
* list
* c
which renders as:
a
I have
Multiple paragraphs.
And
also
a
list
c
Equivalent sane version:
\L[a]
\L[
I have
Multiple paragraphs.
\L[And]
\L[also]
\L[a]
\L[list]
]
\L[c]
which renders as:
a
I have
Multiple paragraphs.
And
also
a
list
c
Insane lists may be escaped with a backslash as usual:
Equation IDs and titles and linking to equations works identically to images, see that section for full details. Here is one equation reference example that links to the following insane syntax equation: Equation 7. "My first insane equation":
$$
\sqrt{1 + 1}
$$
{title=My first insane equation}
See the: <equation Pytogoras theorem>.
$$
c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}
$$
{title=Pytogoras theorem}
{description=This important equation allows us to find the distance between two points.}
Our goal is to collect the most popular macros from the most popular pre-existing LaTeX packages and make them available with this mechanism.
The built-in macros are currently only available on OurBigBook CLI and OurBigBook Web, not when using the JavaScript API directly. We should likely make that possible as well at some point.
If your project has multiple .bigb input files, you can share Mathematics definitions across all files by adding them to the ourbigbook.tex file on the toplevel directory.
For example, if ourbigbook.tex contains:
\newcommand{\foo}[0]{bar}
then from any .bigb file we in the project can use:
$$
\foo
$$
Note however that this is not portable to OurBigBook Web and will likely never be, as we want Web source to be reusable across authors. So the ony way to avoid macro definition conflicts would be to have a namespace system in place, which sounds hard/impossible.
Ideally, you should only use this as a temporary mechanism while you make a pull request to modify the built-in math macros :-)
Paragraphs are created automatically inside macro argument whenever a double newline appears.
Note that OurBigBook paragraphs render in HTML as div with class="p" and not as p. This means that you can add basically anything inside them, e.g. a list:
My favorite list is:
\Ul[
\li[aa]
\li[bb]
]
because it is simple.
which renders as a single paragraph.
One major advantage of this, is that when writing documentation, you often want to keep lists or code blocks inside a given paragraph, so that it is easy to reference the entire paragraph with an ID. Think for example of paragraphs in the C++ standard.
See the: <quote Hamlet what we are>.
\Q[We know what we are, but not what we may be.]
{title=Hamlet what we are}
{description=This quote refers to human's inability to know their own potential, despite understanding their current abilities.}
See the: <quote Hamlet what we are implicit>.
> We know what we are, but not what we may be.
{title=Hamlet what we are implicit}
{description=This quote refers to human's inability to know their own potential, despite understanding their current abilities.}
Any white space indentation inside an explicit \Tr can make the code more readable, and is automatically removed from final output due to remove_whitespace_children which is set for \Table.
To pass further arguments to an implicit table such as title or id, you need to use an explicit table macro as in: Table 3. "My table title".
Multiple source lines, including paragraphs, can be added to a single cell with insane syntax by indenting the cell with exactly two spaces just as for lists, e.g.:
Very analogous to images, only differences will be documented here.
In the case of videos, where to store images becomes even more critical since videos are even larger than images, such that the following storage approaches are impractical off the bat:
\Video[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Vacuum_pump_filter_cut_and_place_in_eppendorf.webm]
{id=sample-video-in-wikimedia-commons}
{title=Nice sample video stored in Wikimedia Commons}
{start=5}
We also handle more complex transcoded video URLs just fine:
\Video[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/1/19/Scientific_Industries_Inc_Vortex-Genie_2_running.ogv/Scientific_Industries_Inc_Vortex-Genie_2_running.ogv.480p.vp9.webm]
{id=sample-video-in-wikimedia-commons-transcoded}
{title=Nice sample video stored in Wikimedia Commons transcoded}
it makes it easier for other users to find and re-use your videos
If your video does not fit the above Wikimedia Commons requirements, YouTube could be a good bet. OurBigBook automatically detects YouTube URLs for you, so the following should just work:
\Video[https://youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU&t=38]
{id=sample-video-from-youtube-implicit-youtube}
{title=Nice sample video embedded from YouTube implicit from `youtube.com` URL}
\Video[https://youtu.be/YeFzeNAHEhU?t=38]
{id=sample-video-from-youtube-implicit-youtu-be}
{title=Nice sample video embedded from YouTube implicit from `youtu.be` URL}
Alternatively, you can reach the same result in a more explicit and minimal way by setting {provider=youtube} and the start arguments:
\Video[YeFzeNAHEhU]{provider=youtube}
{id=sample-video-from-youtube-explicit}
{title=Nice sample video embedded from YouTube with explicit `youtube` argument}
{start=38}
\Video[Tank_man_side_hopping_in_front_of_some_tanks.mp4]
{id=sample-video-in-repository}
{title=Nice sample video stored in this repository}
{source=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU}
{start=3}
But this breaks page semantics however, we don't know how to work around that
youtube videos: same as above for the iframe, but this should be less problematic since YouTube videos are not viewable without JavaScript anyways, and who cares about iframe semantics?
so we see that the \xmagic argument gets added. It is that argument that for example adds the missing -, and removes the pluralization to find the correct ID internal-link. For more details, see the documentation of the \xmagic argument.
Like other insane constructs, insane internal links are exactly equivalent to the sane version, so you can just add other arguments after the construct, e.g.:
A common usage pattern is that we want to use header titles in non-fullinternal links as the definition of a concept without repeating the title, for example:
== Dog
Cute animal.
\x[cats][Cats] are its natural enemies.
== Cats
This is the natural enemy of a \x[dog][dog].
\x[dog][Dogs] are cute, but they are still the enemy.
One example of a cat is \x[felix-the-cat].
=== Felix the Cat
Felix is not really a \x[cats][cat], just a carton character.
However, word inflection makes it much harder to avoid retyping the definition again.
For example, in the previous example, without any further intelligent behaviour we would be forced to re-type \x[dog][dog] instead of the desired \x[dog].
OurBigBook can take care of some inflection cases for you.
For capitalization, both headers and internal link macros have the cboolean argument which stands for "capitalized":
for headers, c means that the header title has fixed capitalization as given in the title, i.e.
if the title has a capital first character, it will always show as a capital, as is the case for most proper noun
if it is lower case, it will also always remain lower case, as is the case for some rare proper nouns, notably the name of certain companies
This means that for such headers, c in the x has no effect. Maybe we should give an error in that case. But lazy now, send PR.
for internal link macros, c means that the first letter of the title should be capitalized.
Using this option is required when you are starting a sentence with a non-proper noun.
if given and true, this automatically pluralizes the last word of the target title by using the blakeembrey/pluralize library.
if given and false, automatically singularize
if not given, don't change the number of elements
If your desired pluralization is any more complex than modifying the last word of the title, you must do it manually however.
With those rules in mind, the previous OurBigBook example can be written with less repetition as:
== Dog
Cute animal.
\x[cats]{c} are its natural enemies.
== Cats
This is the natural enemy of a \x[dog].
\x[dog]{p} are cute, but they are still the enemy.
One example of a cat is \x[Felix the Cat].
=== Felix the Cat
{c}
Felix is not really a \x[cats][cat], just a carton character.
If plural and capitalization don't handle your common desired inflections, you can also just create custom ones with the \Hsynonym argument.
Now for a live example for quick and dirty interactive testing.
That library handles most cases well, but note that English language perfection is never possible with it as it would likely require having word databases which the authors do not wish to support, e.g. to deal with uncountable nouns such as "mathematics" correctly: github.com/plurals/pluralize/issues/60#issuecomment-310740594
\Hdisambiguate argument: disambiguate prevents the determination of plural inflection, e.g. in:
= Python
{disambiguate=animal}
I like <python animal>.
there is currently no way to make it output Pythons in the plural without resorting to either \xp argument or an explicit content, because if you wrote:
I like <pythons animal>.
it would just lead to Id not found, as we would try the plural vs singular on animal only.
Maybe one day we can implement an even insaner system that understands that parenthesis should skipped for the inflection as in:
If you use \x within a title, which most commonly happens for image titles, that can generate complex dependencies between IDs, which would either be harder to implement, or lead to infinite recursion.
To prevent such problems, OurBigBook emits an error if you use an \x without content in the title of one of the following elements:
any header. For example, the following gives an error:
= h1
{id=myh1}
== \x[myh1]
This could be solved by either adding a content to the reference:
= h1
{id=myh1}
== \x[myh1][mycontent]
or by adding an explicit ID to the header:
= h1
{id=myh1}
== \x[myh1]
{id=myh2}
non-header (e.g. an image) that links to the title of another non-header
For non-headers, things are a bit more relaxed, and we can link to headers, e.g.:
= h1
\Image[myimg.jpg]
{title=my \x[h1]}
This is allowed because OurBigBook calculates IDs in two stages: first for all headers, and only later non non-headers.
While it is technically possible relax the above limitations and give an error only in case of loops, it would require a bit of extra work which we don't want to put in right now: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/95.
Furthermore, the above rules do not exclude infinite rendering loops, but OurBigBook detects such loops and gives a nice error message, this has been fixed at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/34
This infinite recursion is fundamentally not technically solved: the user has to manually break the loop by providing an x content explicitly, e.g. in either:
To make toplevel links cleaner, if the target header is the very first element of the other page, then the link does not get a fragment, e.g.: \x[not-index] rendered as:
<a href="not-index"
and not:
<a href="not-index#not-index"
while \x[h2-in-not-the-index] is rendered with the fragment:
<a href="not-index#h2-in-not-the-index"
Reference to the first header of another file that is a second inclusion:
When running in Node.js, OurBigBook dumps the IDs of all processed files to a _out/db.sqlite3 file in the _out directory, and then reads from that file when IDs are needed.
When converting under a directory that contains ourbigbook.json, _out/db.sqlite3 is placed inside the same directory as the ourbigbook.json file.
If there is no ourbigbook.json in parent directories, then _out/db.sqlite3 is placed in the current working directory.
For example, suppose "Superconductivity" is a descendant of "Condensed Matter Physics", and that the source for both is located at condensed-matter-physics.bigb, so that both appear on the same .html page condensed-matter-physics.html.
When linking to Superconductivity from an external page such as statistical-physics.bigb you write just <superconductivity> and NOT <condensed-matter-physics#superconductivity>. OurBigBook then automatically trakcs where superconductivity is located and produces href="condensed-matter-physics#superconductivity" for you.
This is important because on a static website, the location of headers might change. E.g. if you start writing a lot about superconductivity you would eventually want to split it to its own page, superconductivity.html otherwise page loads for condensed-matter-physics.html would become too slow as that file would become too large.
But if your links read <condensed-matter-physics#superconductivity>, and all links would break when you move things around.
So instead, you simply link to the ID <superconductivity>, and ourbigbook renders links correctly for you wherever the output lands.
When moving headers to separate pages, it is true that existing links to subheaders will break, but that simply cannot be helped. Large pages must be split into smaller ones. The issue can be mitigated in the following ways:
-S, --split-headers, which readers will eventually understand are better permalinks
JavaScript redirect to split on missing ID, which automatically redirect condensed-matter-physics#superconductivity to superconductivity, potentially hitting a split header if the current page does not contain the HTML ID superconductivity.
If you really want to to use scopes, e.g. enforce the ID of "superconductivity" to be "condensed-matter-physics/superconductivity", then you can use the scope feature. However, this particular case would likely be a bad use case for that feature. You want your IDs to be as short as possible, which causes less need for refactoring, and makes topics on OurBigBook Web more likely to have matches from other users.
If the target title argument contains a link from either another internal links or a regular external hyperlink, OurBigBook automatically prevents that link from rendering as a link when no explicit body is given.
This is a nice image: \x[image-aa-zxcv-lolol-bb].
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{title=aa \x[internal-link-title-link-removal][zxcv] \a[http://example.com][lolol] bb}
so note how "Bat" has a list of tags including "Flying animal", but Cat does not, due to the child.
This property does not affect how the table of contents is rendered. We could insert elements sections there multiple times, but it has the downside that browser Ctrl + F searches would hit the same thing multiple times on the table of contents, which might make finding things harder.
== My title{id=my-id}
Read this \x[my-id][amazing section].
If the second argument, the content argument, is not present, it expand to the header title, e.g.:
== My title{id=my-id}
Read this \x[my-id].
is the same as:
== My title{id=my-id}
Read this \x[my-id][My title].
Secondary children are normally basically used as "tags": a header such as Bat can be a direct child of Mammal, and a secondary child of Flying animal, or vice versa. Both Mammal and Flying animal are then basically ancestors. But we have to chose one main ancestor as "the parent", and other secondary ancestors will be seen as tags.
This option first does ID target from title conversion on the argument, so you can e.g. keep any spaces or use capitalization in the title as in:
= Animal
== Flying animal
{child=Big bat}
== Big bat
TODO the fact that this transformation is done currently makes it impossible to use "non-standard IDs" that contain spaces or uppercase letters. If someone ever wants that, we could maybe add a separate argument that does not do the expansion e.g.:
= Animal
== Flying animal
{childId=Big bat}
== Big bat
{id=Big bat}
but definitely the most important use case is having easier to type and read source with the standard IDs.
To also show the section auto-generated number as in "Section X.Y My title" we add the optional {full}boolean argument to the internal link, for example:
{full} is not needed for internal links to most macros besides headers, which use full by default as seen by the default_x_style_full macro property in --help-macros. This is for example the case for images. You can force this to be disabled with {full=0}:
Compare \x[image-my-test-image]{full=0} vs \x[image-my-test-image]{full=1}.
This argument makes writing many internal links more convenient, and it was notably introduced because it serves as the sane version of insane internal links.
content capitalization and pluralization are detected from the string, and implicitly set the \xc argument and \xp argument. In the example:
{c} capitalization is set because Internal references starts with an upper case character I
{p} pluralization is set because Internal references ends in a plural word
In this simple example, the content therefore will be exactly Internal references as in the source. But note that this does not necessarily need to be the case, e.g. if we had done:
\x[Internal Reference]{magic}
then the content would be:
Internal reference
without capital R, i.e. everything except capitalization and pluralization is ignored. This forgiving way of doing things means that writers don't need to remember the exact ideal capitalization of everything, which is very hard to remember.
It also means that any more complex elements will be automatically rendered as usual, e.g. if we had:
then the output would still contain the <i> italic tag.
If we had a scope as in \x[my scope/Internal references], then each scope part is checked separately. E.g. in this case we would have upper case Internal references, even though my scope is lowercase, and so {c} would be set.
the ID is calculated as follows:
automatic ID from title conversion is performed, with you exception: forwards slashs / are kept, in order to make scopes work.
In our case, there aren't any slashes /, so it just gives internal-references. But if instead we had e.g.: \x[my scope/internal reference]{magic}, then we would reach my-scope/internal-reference and not my-scope-internal-reference.
if there is a match to an existing ID use it. internal-references in the plural does not match, so go to the next step
if the above failed, try singularizing the last word as in the \xp argument with p=0 before doing automatic ID from title conversion. This gives internal-reference, which does exist, and so we use that.
If true, then the target of a this link is called a "topic link" and gets treated specially, pointing to an external OurBigBook Web topic rather than a header defined in the current project.
For example, when rendering a static website, a link such as:
If an insane topic link is made up of a single word then it can be written in the following even succincter notation, without the need for angle brackets:
Unlike local links, it is not possible to automatically determine the exact pluralization of a topic link because:
it would require communicating with the OurBigBook Web API, which we could in principle do, but we would rather not have static builds depend on Web instances
topics can be written by multiple authors, and there could be both plural and singular versions of each topic ID, which makes it hard to determine which one is "correct"
Therefore, it is up to authors to specifically specify the desired pluralization of their topic links:
by default, topic IDs are automatically singularized, e.g.:
Every insane syntax does however have an equivalent sane syntax.
The style recommendation is: use the insane version which is shorter, unless you have a specific reason to use the sane version.
Insane in our context does not mean worse. It just mean "harder for the computer to understand". But it is more important that humans can understand in the first place! It is find to make the computer work a bit more for us when we are able to.
and so we see that level and the content argument are positional arguments, and id and scope are named arguments.
Generally, positional arguments are few (otherwise it would be hard to know which is which is which), and are almost always used for a given element so that they save us from typing the name too many times.
The order of positional arguments must of course be fixed, but named arguments can go anywhere. We can even mix positional and named arguments however we want, although this is not advised for clarity.
Positive nonzero integer arguments accept only the characters [0-9] as their input, and 0 may not be the first character. If anything else is present, an error is raised.
In OurBigBook Markup, every single macro has an ID, which can be either:
explicit: extracted from some input given by the user, either the id argument or the title argument. Explicit IDs can be referenced in Internal links and must be unique
implicit: automatically generated numerical ID. Implicit IDs cannot be referenced in internal links and don't need to be unique. Their primary application is generating on hover links next to everything you hover, e.g. arbitrary paragraphs.
The disambiguatenamed argument helps you deal more neatly with such problems.
Have a look at this example:
My favorite snakes are \x[python-genus]{p}!
My favorite programming language is \x[python-programming-language]!
\x[python-genus]{full}
\x[python-programming-language]{full}
= Python
{disambiguate=genus}
{parent=disambiguate-argument}
= Python
{c}
{disambiguate=programming language}
{parent=disambiguate-argument}
{title2=.py}
{wiki}
shows up on the header between parenthesis, much like Wikipedia, as well as in full internal links
does not show up on non-full references. This makes it much more likely that you will be able to reuse the title automatically on an internal link without the content argument: we wouldn't want to say "My favorite programming language is Python (programming language)" all the time, would we?
gets added to the default \Hwiki argument inside parenthesis, following Wikipedia convention, therefore increasing the likelihood that you will be able to go with the default Wikipedia value
Besides disambiguating headers, the disambiguate argument has a second related application: disambiguating IDs of images. For example:
\x[image-the-title-of-my-disambiguate-image]{full=0}
\x[image-the-title-of-my-disambiguate-image-2]{full=0}
\x[image-the-title-of-my-disambiguate-image]{full}
\x[image-the-title-of-my-disambiguate-image-2]{full}
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{title=The title of my disambiguate image}
\Image[Tank_man_standing_in_front_of_some_tanks.jpg]
{title=The title of my disambiguate image}
{disambiguate=2}
Note that unlike for headers, disambiguate does not appear on the title of images at all. It serves only to create an unique ID that can be later referred to. Headers are actually the only case where disambiguate shows up on the visible rendered output. We intend on making this application obsolete however with:
This use case is even more useful when title-from-src is enable by default for the media-providers entry, so you don't have to repeat titles several times over and over.
Arguments that are opened with more than one square brackets [ or curly braces { are literal arguments.
In literal arguments, OurBigBook is not parsed, and the entire argument is considered as text until a corresponding close with the same number of characters.
Therefore, you cannot have nested content, but it makes it extremely convenient to write code blocks or mathematics.
For example, a multiline code block with double open and double close square brackets inside can be enclosed in triple square brackets:
A literal argument looks like this in OurBigBook:
\C[[
\C[
A multiline
code block.
]
]]
And another paragraph.
which renders as:
A literal argument looks like this in OurBigBook:
\C[
A multiline
code block.
]
And another paragraph.
The same works for inline code:
The program \c[[puts("]");]] is very complex.
which renders as:
The program puts("]"); is very complex.
Within literal blocks, only one thing can be escaped with backslashes are:
leading open square bracket [
trailing close square bracket ]
The rule is that:
if the first character of a literal argument is a sequence of backslashes (\), and it is followed by another argument open character (e.g. [, remove the first \ and treat the other characters as regular text
if the last character of a literal argument is a \, ignore it and treat the following closing character (e.g. ]) as regular text
The exception is when the newline is placed between two inline macros, where it generates an explicit line break. This is particularly useful for poetry, for example:
The macro name and the first argument, and any two consecutive arguments, can be optionally separated by exactly one newline character, e.g.:
\H
[2]
{scope}
[Design goals]
is equivalent to:
\H[2]{scope}[Design goals]
which is also equivalent to:
\H[2]{scope}
[Design goals]
This allows to greatly improve the readability of long argument lists by having them one per line.
There is one exception to this however: inside an insane header, any newline is interpreted as the end of the insane header. This is why the following works as expected:
== My header 2 `some code`
{id=asdf}
and the id gets assigned to the header rather than the trailing code element.
Every character that cannot be a macro identifier can be escaped with a backslash \. If you try to escape a macro identifier it of course treats the thing as a macro instead and fails, e.g. in \a it would try to use a macro called \a, not escape the character a.
For some characters, escaping or not does not make any difference because they don't have any meaning to OurBigBook Markup, e.g. currently % is always the exact same as \%.
But in non-literal macro arguments, you have to use a backslash to escape the following if you want them to not have any magical meaning:
A macro argument property that is inlineOnly can only contain inline macros. If any block macros present in the argument or its descendants, will lead to a conversion error.
There are two main rationales for enforcing these rules:
the HTML h1 - h6 header HTML elements can only contain phrasing content (analogout to our inline macros) for the HTML to be valid. We could chose to use styled divs instead of h elements, but this could have a negative SEO impact. All other HTML elements could be replaced by divs without issue however, the problem really is only h.
on OurBigBook Web, where multiple users are working together and many titles from multiple users show on index pages, it is saner to be more restrictive on what is allowed on titles and to prevent visually very large things from being added in order to prevent bad actors or accidents from disrupting other users too much
because the content argument of ul is marked with remove_whitespace_children and automatically removes any whitespace children (such as a newline) as a result.
However, arguments with the multiplemacro argument property set to true can be given multiple times, and each time the argument is given, the new value is appended to a list containing all the values.
Internally, multiple is implemented by creating a new level in the abstract syntax tree, and storing each argument separately under a newly generated dummy nodes as in:
AstNode: H
AstArgument: child
AstNode: Comment
AstArgument: content
AstNode: plaintext
AstNode: x
AstNode: Comment
AstArgument: content
AstNode: plaintext
AstNode: x
This section documents ways to classify macro arguments that are analogous to macro argument properties, but which don't yet have clear and uniform programmatic effects and so are a bit more hand wavy for now.
The content argument of macros contains the "main content" of the macro, i.e. the textual content that will show the most proeminently once the macro is rendered. It is usually, but not always, the first positional argument of macros. We should probably make it into an official macro argument property at some point.
In most cases, it is quite obvious which argument is the content argument, e.g.:
\a macro: in \a[https://example.com][example website] then example website is the content argument
Some macros however don't have a content argument, especially when they don't show any textual acontent as their primary rendered output, e.g.:
\Image macro: this macro has title byt not content, e.g. as in: \Image[flower.jpg]{title=}, since the primary content is the Image rather than any specific text
Philosophically, the content argument of a macro is analogous to the innerHTML of an HTML tag, as opposed to attributes such as href= and so on. The difference is that in OurBigBook Markup, every macro argument can contain child elements, while in HTML only the innerHTML, but not the attributes, can.
If the project toplevel directory of an OurBigBook project is also a git repository, and if git is installed, then the OurBigBook project is said to be a "Git tracked project".
IDs that start with an underscore _ are reserved for OurBigBook usage, and will give an error if you try to use them, in order to prevent ID conflicts.
For example:
the table of contents uses an ID _toc the ID of the ToC is always fixed to toc. If you try to use that for another element, you will get the following error:
elements without an explicit ID may receive automatically generated IDs of type _1, _2 and so on
If you use a reserved ID, you will get an error mesasge of type:
error: tmp.bigb:3:1: IDs that start with "_" are reserved: "_toc"
OurBigBook CLI is the executable program called ourbigbook which comes when you install npm install ourbigbook. It is the main command line utility of the OurBigBook Project.
Its functionality will also be exposed on GUI editor support such as Visual Studio Code to make things nicer for non-technical users.
The main functionalities of the executable are to:
The HTML files can then be either viewd from your filesystem on a browser, or uploaded and hosted very cheaply or for free so that others can see it, e.g. on GitHub Pages.
OurBigBook Web takes as input the exact same format of OurBigBook Markup files used by OurBigBook CLI. TODO support/improve import/export to/from OurBigBook Web, see also: -W, --web.
The OurBigBook CLI calls the OurBigBook Library to convert each input file.
Convert a .bigb file to HTML and output the HTML to a file with the same basename without extension, e.g.:
Convert a .bigb file from stdin to HTML and output the contents of <body> to stdout:
printf 'ab\ncd\n' | ourbigbook --body-only
Stdin converion is a bit different from conversion from a file in that it ignores the ourbigbook.json and any other setting files present in the current directory or its ancestors. Also, it does not produce any changes to the ID database. In other words, a conversion from stdin is always treated as if it were outside of any project, and therefore should always produce the same results regardless of the current working directory.
it converts all files in the current directory separately, e.g.:
index.bigb to _out/html/index.html, since index is a magic name that we want to show on the root URL
not-index.bigb to _out/html/not-index.html, as this one is a regular name unlike index
main.scss to main.css
If one of the input files starts getting too large, usually the toplevel index.bigb in which you dump everything by default like Ciro does, you can speed up development and just compile files individually with either:
Note however that when those individual files have a cross file internal link to something defined in not-index.bigb, e.g. via \x[h2-in-not-the-index], then you must have first previously done pass once with:
npx ourbigbook .
to parse all files and extract all necessary IDs to the ID database. That would be optimized slightly with the --no-render command line option:
npx ourbigbook --no-render .
to only extract the IDs but not render, which speeds things up considerably
When dealing with large files, you might also be interested in the following amazing options:
You can now just give the generated _out/html/index.html to any reader and they should be able to view it offline without installing anything. The flags are:
--embed-includes: without this, \Include[not-index] shows as a link to the file _out/html/not-index.html which comes from not-index.bigb With the flag, not-index.bigb output gets embedded into the output _out/html/index.html directly
--embed-resources: by default, we link to CSS and JavaScript that lives inside node_modules. With this flag, that CSS and JavaScript is copied inline into the document instead. One day we will try to handle images that way as well
You almost never want to do this except when developing OurBigBook, as it won't be clear what version of ourbigbook the document should be compiled with. Just be a good infant and use OurBigBook with the template that contains a package.json via npx, OK?
Furthermore, the default install of Chromium on Ubuntu 21.04 uses Snap and blocks access to dotfiles. For example, in a sane NVM install, our global CSS would live under /home/ciro/.nvm/versions/node/v14.17.0/lib/node_modules/ourbigbook/_obb/ourbigbook.css, which gets blocked because of the .nvm part:
One workaround is to use --embed-resources, but this of course generates larger outputs.
To run master globally from source for development see: Section "Run OurBigBook master". This one actually works despite the dotfile thing since your development path is normally outside of dotfiles.
A fundamental design choice of the OurBigBook Project is that, except for bugs, a single OurBigBook Markup source tree can be published in both of those ways without any changes.
This means that you are likely to always have several free or cheap choices of where to upload your content to, making it essentially all but TEOTWAWKI-proof
Furthermore, it also has some non multi-user features which cannot be feasibly implemented in a static website because they would require too much storage, on the fly generation is the only feasible way to deal with them:
Its main downside is that it is more expensive to host.
The OurBigBook Project will do its best to keep OurBigBook.com uploading as free as possible, but upload limits necessarily have to be more strict than those of static websites, as the underlying operating cost is larger.
Those basenames have the following magic properties:
the default output file name for an index file in HTML output is either:
index.html when in the project toplevel directory. E.g. index.bigb renders to index.html. Note that GitHub and many other static website hosts then automatically hide the index.html part from the URL, so that your index.bigb hosted at http://example.com will be accessible simply under http://example.com and not http://example.com/index.html
the name of the subdirectory in which it is located when not in the project toplevel directory. E.g. mysubdir/index.bigb outputs to mysubdir.html
otherwise, if the input path is a directory, it is used
otherwise, the directory containing the input file is used
For example, consider the file following file structure relative to the current working directory:
path/to/notindex.bigb
In this case:
if there is no ourbigbook.json file:
if we run ourbigbook .: the toplevel directory is the current directory ., and so notindex.bigb has ID path/to/notindex
if we run ourbigbook path: same
if we run ourbigbook path/to: same
if we run ourbigbook path/to/notindex.bigb: same
if there is a path/ourbigbook.json file:
if we run ourbigbook .: the toplevel directory is the current directory . because the ourbigbook.json is below the entry point and is not seen, and so notindex.bigb has ID path/to/notindex
if we run ourbigbook path: the toplevel directory is the directory with the ourbigbook.json, path, and so notindex.bigb has ID to/notindex
When the file or directory being converted has an ancestor directory with a ourbigbook.json file, then your current working directory does not have any effect on OurBigBook output. For example if we have:
then all of the following conversions produce the same output:
directory conversion:
cd /project && ourbigbook .
cd / && ourbigbook project
cd project/subdir && ourbigbook ..
file conversion:
cd /project && ourbigbook index.bigb
cd / && ourbigbook project/index.bigb
cd project/subdir && ourbigbook ../index.bigb
When there isn't a ourbigbook.json, everything happens as though there were an empty ourbigbook.json file in the current working directory. So for example:
outputs that would be placed relative to inputs are still placed in that place, e.g. index.bigb -> index.html always stay together
outputs that would be placed next to the ourbigbook.json are put in the current working directory, e.g. the _out directory
Internally, the general philosophy is that the JavaScript API in index.js works exclusively with paths relative to the project toplevel directory. It is then up to callers such as ourbigbook to ensure that filesystem specifics handle the relative paths correctly.
The --dry-run option is a good way to debug the --publish option, as it builds the publish output files without doing any git commands that would be annoying to revert. So after doing:
ourbigbook --dry-run --publish .
you can just go and inspect the generated HTML to see what would get pushed at:
Similar to --dry-run, but it runs all git commands except for git push, which gives a clearer idea of what --publish would actually do including the git operations, but without publishing anything:
The problem those cause is that the IDs of included headers show as duplicate IDs of those in the ID database.
This should be OK to start with because the more common use case with --html-single-page is that of including all headers in a single document. TODO: this option is gone.
Otherwise, include only adds the headers of the other file to the table of contents of the current one, but not the body of the other file. The ToC entries then point to the headers of the included external files.
You may want to use this option together with --embed-resources to produce fully self-contained individual HTML files for your project.
The advantage of this is that we don't have to duplicate this for every single file. But if you are giving this file to someone else, they would likely not have those files at those exact locations, which would break the HTML page.
With --embed-resources, the output contains instead something like:
<style>/*! normalize.css v8.0.1 | MIT License | github.com/necolas/normalize.css */html{ [[ ... A LOT MORE CSS ... ]]</style>
<script>/*! For license information please see ourbigbook_runtime.js.LICENSE.txt */ !function(t,e){"object"==typeof exports&&"object"==typeof module?module.exports=e() [[ ... A LOT MORE JAVASCRIPT ... ]]</script>
This way, all the required CSS and JavaScript will be present in the HTML file itself, and so readers will be able to view the file correctly without needing to install any missing dependencies.
The use case for this option is to produce a single HTML file for an entire build that is fully self contained, and can therefore be given to consumers and viewed offline, much like a PDF.
Examples of embeddings done:
CSS and JavaScript are copy pasted in place into the HTML.
The default built-in CSS and JavaScript files used by OurBigBook (e.g. the KaTeX CSS used for mathematics) are currently all automatically downloaded as NPM package dependencies to ourbigbook
Without --embed-resources, those CSS and JavaScript use their main cloud CDN URLs, and therefore require Internet connection to view the generated documents.
The embedded version of the document can be viewed offline however.
There is however a known bug: KaTeX fonts are not currently embedded, so math won't work properly. The situation is similar as for images, but a bit harder because we also need to fetch the blobs from the CSS, which is likely doable from Webpack:
Examples of embedding that could be implemented in the future:
images are downloaded if needed and embedded as data: URLs.
Doing this however has a downside: it would slow the page loading down. The root problem is that HTML was not designed to contain assets, and notably it doesn't have byte position indices that can tell it to skip blobs while parsing, and how to refer to them later on when they show up on the screen. This is kind of why EPUB exists: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/158
Images that are managed by the project itself and already locally present, such as those inside the project itself or due to media-providers usually don't require download.
For images linked directly from the web, we maintain a local download cache, and skip downloads if the image is already in the cache.
To re-download due to image updates, use either:
--asset-cache-update: download all images such that the local disk timestamp is older than the HTTP modification date with If-Modified-Since
--asset-cache-update-force: forcefully redownload all assets
Keep in mind that certain things can never be embedded, e.g.:
YouTube videos, since YouTube does not offer any download API
Always render all selected files, irrespectively of if they are known to be outdated or not.
OurBigBook stores the timestamp of the last successful ID extraction step for each file.
For ID extraction, we always skip the extraction if the filesystem timestamp of a source file is older than the last successful extraction.
For render:
we mark output files as outdated when the corresponding source file is parsed
we also skip rendering non-outdated files by default when you invoke ourbigbook on a directory, e.g. ourbigbook ., as this greatly speeds up the interactive error fixing turnaround time
we always re-render fully when you specify a single file, e.g. ourbigbook path/to/index.bigb
However, note that skipping renders, unlike for ID extraction, can lead to some outdated pages.
This option disables the timestamp skip for rendering, so ensure that you will get a fully clean updated render.
E.g. consider if you had two files:
file1.bigb
= File 1
== File 1 1
file2.bigb
= File 2
== File 2 1
\x[file-1-1]
We then do the initial conversion:
ourbigbook .
we see output like:
extract_ids file1.bigb
extract_ids file1.bigb finished in 45.61287499964237 ms
extract_ids file2.bigb
extract_ids file2.bigb finished in 15.163879998028278 ms
render file1.bigb
render file1.bigb finished in 23.21016100049019 ms
render file2.bigb
render file2.bigb finished in 25.92908499762416 ms
indicating full conversion without skips.
But then if we just modify fil1.bigb as:
= File 1
== File 1 1 hacked
{id=file-1-1}
the following conversion with ourbigbook . would look like:
extract_ids file1.bigb
extract_ids file1.bigb finished in 45.61287499964237 ms
extract_ids file2.bigb
extract_ids file2.bigb skipped by timestamp
render file1.bigb
render file1.bigb finished in 41.026930000633 ms
render file2.bigb
render file2.bigb skipped by timestamp
and because we skipped file2.bigb render, it will still have the outdated "File 1 1" instead of "File 1 1 hacked".
In order to reach a final stable state, you might need to run the conversion twice. This is not ideal but we don't have the patience to fix it. The reason is that links in image titles may expand twice. This is the usual type of two level recursion that has caused much more serious problems, see e.g. \x within title restrictions. E.g. starting with:
<image my big dog>
\Image[image.png]{title=My <big dog>}
= Big dog
the first conversion leads to uppercasing inside the image title:
<image my big dog>
\Image[image.png]{title=My <big Dog>}
= Big Dog
and the second one to uppercasing the reference to the image title:
<image my big Dog>
\Image[image.png]{title=My <big Dog>}
= Big Dog
This nifty little option outputs to stderr what the header graph looks like!
It is a bit like a table of contents in your terminal, for when you need to have a look at the outline of the document to decide where to place a new header, but are not in the mood to open a browser or use the browser editor with preview.
which shows how long different parts of the conversion process took to help identify bottlenecks.
This option can also be useful to mark phases of the conversion to identify from which phase other logs are coming from, e.g. if we wanted to know which part of the conversion is making a ton of database requests we could run:
ourbigbook --log db perf -- index.bigb
and we would see the database requests made at each conversion phase.
Note that --log perf currently does not take sub-converts into account, e.g. include and \OurBigBookExample both call the toplevel conversion function convert, and therefore go through all the conversion intervals, but we do not take those it account, and just dump them all into the same toplevel interval that they happen in, currently between post_process_start and post_process_end.
Skip the database sanity check that is normally done after the ID extraction step.
This was originally added to speed up, originally added to speed up the web upload development loop, when we knew that there were no errors in the database after a local conversion, and wanted to get to the upload phase faster, but the DB check can take several seconds for a large input.
Don't use the ID database during this run. This implies that the on-disk database is not read, and also not written to. Instead, a temporary clean in-memory database is used.
Only extract IDs to fill the ID database, don't render. This saves time if you only want to render a single file which has references to other files without getting any errors.
Outputs as OurBigBook Markup, i.e. the same format as the input itself!
While using -O bigb is not a common use case, the existence of this format has the following applications:
automatic source code formatting e.g. with --format-source. The recommended format, including several edge cases, can be seen in the test file test_bigb_output.bigb, which should be left unchanged by a bigb conversion.
manipulating source code on OurBigBook Web to allow editing either individual sections separatelly, or multiple sections at once
this could be adapted to allows us to migrate updates with breaking changes to the source code more easily. Alternatively on OurBigBook Web, we might just start storing the AST instead of source, and just rendering the source whenever users want to edit it.
This output format is used an intermediate step in automatic ID from title, that unlike the regular HTML output does not have any tags.
It does not have serious applications to end users. We decided to expose it from the CLI mostly for fun, as it posed no extra work at all as it is treated internally exactly like any other conversion format.
This conversion type is useful in situations that users don't expect conversion to produce any HTML tags. For example, you could create a header:
= My \i[asdf]
and then following the automatic ID from title algorithm, that header would have the more commonly desired ID my-asdf, and not my-<i>asdf</i> or my-i-asdf-i.
Similarly, any macro argument that references an ID undergoes id output format conversion. E.g. the above header could be referenced by:
<My \i[asdf]>
which is equivalent to:
\x[my-asdf]
Besides being more intuitive, this conversion also guarantees greater format portability, in case we ever decide to support other output formats besides HTML!
Macros that don't have a content argument are just completely removed, i.e. typically non-textual macros such as images. We could put effort in outputting their title argument correctly, but meh, not worth the effort.
The id output format also serves as a good start generalizing OurBigBook to multiple outputs, as this is a simple format.
\x uses href if the content is not given explicitly.
Previously, if \x didn't have a content, we were actually rendering the \x to calculate the ID. But then we noticed that doing so would require another parse pass, so we just went for this simpler approach. This is closely linked to \x within title restrictions.
Attempt to publish without converting first. Implies the --publish option.
This can only work if there was previously a successful publish conversion done, which later failed to publish during the following steps, e.g. due to a network error.
This option was introduced for debugging purposes to help get the git commands right for large conversions that took a look time.
Publish as a local directory that can be zipped and sent to someone else, and then correctly viewed by a browser locally by the receiver. You can then zip it from the Linux command line for example with:
ourbigbook --publish --publish-target local
cd _out/publish/_out
zip -r local.zip local
If you want to publish your root user page, which appears at / (e.g. github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io for the user cirosantilli), GitHub annoyingly forces you to use the master branch for the HTML output:
This means that you must place your .bigb input files in a branch other than master to clear up master for the generated HTML.
ourbigbook automatically detects if your repository is a root repository or not by parsing git remote output, but you must setup the branches correctly yourself.
Split each header into its own separate HTML output file.
This option allows you to keep all headers in a single source file, which is much more convenient than working with a billion separate source files, and let them grow naturally as new information is added, but still be able to get a small output page on the rendered website that contains just the content of the given header. Such split pages:
Each header contains a on-hover link to the single-file split version of the header.
hello-split.html: contains only the contents directly under = h1, but not under any of the subheaders, e.g.:
h1 content. appears in this rendered output
h1-1-1 does not appear in this rendered output
The -split suffix can be customized with the \HsplitSuffix argument option. The -split suffix is appended in order to differentiate the output path from hello.html
h1-1.html, h1-1-1.html, h1-1-2.html: contain only the contents direcly under their headers, analogously to hello-split.html, but now we don't need to worry about the input filename and collisiont, and just directly use the ID of each header
--split-headers is implied by the --publish option: the published website will automatically get the split pages. There is no way to turn it off currently. A pull request would be accepted, especially if it offers a ourbigbook.json way to do it. Maybe it would be nice to have a more generalized way of setting any CLI option equivalent from the ourbigbook.json, and an option cli vs cli-publish so that cli-publish is publish only. Just lazy for now/not enough pressing use case met.
In order to make the split version be the default for some headers, you can use the \HsplitDefault argument.
This is something that we might consider changing with some option, e.g. keeping the split headers more self contained. But for now, the general feeling is that going to nosplit by default is the best default.
git_sha: SHA of the latest git commit of the source code if in a git repository
github_prefix: this variable is set only if if the "github" media provider. It points to the URL prefix of the provider, e.g. if you have in your ourbigbook.json:
May be an empty string in the case of autogenerated sources, notably automatic directory listings, so you should always check for that with something like:
{% if input_path != "" %}
<div>Source code for this page: <a href="{{ raw_relpath }}/{{ input_path }}">{{ input_path }}</a></div>
{% endif %}
is_root_relpath. Boolean. True if the toplevel being rendered on this output file is the the index article. E.g. in:
index.bigb
= John Smith's homepage
== Mathematics
with split header conversion, the value of is_root_relpath would be:
index.html: true
split.html: true
mathematics.html: false
root_page: relative path to the toplevel page, e.g. either index.html, ../index.html locally or ./, ../ on server oriented rendereing
root_relpath: relative path from the rendered output to the toplevel directory.
This allows for toplevel resources like CSS to be found seamlessly form inside subdirectories, specially when rendering locally.
For example, for the toplevel CSSmain.css which is generated from main.scss, we can use:
raw_relpath: relative path from the rendered output to the _raw directory. Should be used to prefix all non-OurBigBook Markup output resources, which is the directory where such files are placed during conversion, e.g.
We pick Liquid because it is server-side safe: if we ever some day offer a compilation service, Liquid is designed to prevent arbitrary code execution and infinite loops in templates.
true iff the --publish-target is a standard website, i.e. something that will be hosted publicly on a URL. This is currently true for the following publish targets:
OurBigBook Docs
