Generate Markdown from template - node.js

Question

I'd like to use the node-pandoc module to generate PDFs from Markdown. But I need to create those Markdowns on fly. Are there any templating engines for node.js that can generate plaintext/markdown?

Answer 1

I've recently used underscore's template with plain text files written in rho (which is also a plain-text-to-html tool, like Markdown) to generate plain text documents with dynamic data:
Here's the code of my module (omit the caching if you don't need it):
// compiler.js
'use strict';
var fs = require('fs')
, path = require('path')
, _ = require('underscore');
var cache = {};
exports.getTemplate = function(templateId, cb) {
// Use your extension here
var file = path.join(__dirname, templateId + ".rho");
fs.stat(file, function(err, stat) {
if (err) return cb(err);
// Try to get it from cache
var cached = cache[templateId];
if (cached && cached.mtime >= stat.mtime)
return cb(null, cached.template);
// Read it from file
fs.readFile(file, { encoding: 'utf-8' }, function(err, data) {
if (err) return cb(err);
// Compile it
var template = _.template(data);
// Cache it
cache[templateId] = {
mtime: stat.mtime,
template: template
};
// Return it
return cb(null, template);
});
});
};
exports.compile = function(templateId, data, cb) {
exports.getTemplate(templateId, function(err, template) {
if (err) return cb(err);
try {
return cb(null, template(data));
} catch (e) {
return cb(e);
}
});
}
Now the usage. Assume you have hello.rho with following contents:
# Hello, <%= name %>!
We are happy to have you here, <%= name %>!
You can compile it like this:
require('./compiler').compile('hello', { name: 'World' }, function(err, text) {
if (err) // Handle the error somehow
return console.log(err);
console.log(text);
// You'll get "# Hello, World!\n\nWe're happy to have you here, World!"
// Now chain the compilation to rho, markdown, pandoc or whatever else.
});
If you don't like underscore, then I guess ejs would also do the job just fine.

Answer 2

Take a look at grunt-readme, which - although focused on generating README documentation from templates - is a good example of how you can generate markdown docs from templates.