This output format is mostly a joke.
It is an intermediate step in automatic ID from title, that unlike HTML output does not have any tags.
So for example, converting:
with the
instead of the HTML output:
\i[asdf]
id
output format produces simply:
asdf
<i>asdf</i>
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:
and then following the automatic ID from title algorithm, that header would have the more commonly desired ID
= My \i[asdf]
my-asdf
, and not my-<i>asdf</i>
.Besides being more intuitive, this also guarantees greater format portability, in case we ever decide to support other output formats!
We decided to expose this format from the CLI just for fun, as it posed no extra work at all as it is treated internally exactly like any other conversion format.
And it also was a good start generalizing OurBigBook to multiple outputs, as this is a simple format.
The conversion is very simplistic, it basically just pastes the
content
of most macros. Important exceptions to that include:\x
: see\x
id
output format
So for example if we had:
then the image ID would be
= Title with more
{id=title}
\Image[my.png]{title=My \i[nice] \x[title]
image-my-nice-title
:image-
automatically added prefixmy
: literal textnice
: extract the content of the italictitle
: note how we use thehref
title
instead of what is actually rendered,Title with more
, because\x
is treated somewhat specially for performance reasons
Stuff that is primarily non-textual like images is just completely removed. We could put effort in outputting their title correctly, but meh, not worth the effort.