Markdown and including multiple files

Question

Is there any markdown fork that allows you to reference other files  something like an includes file  Specifically  I want to create a separate markdown file with links that I call often but not always  call this B md   then when I link by reference in the md file I m writing  A md   I d like it to pull the link from the other file  B md  rather than from the end of the current file  A md

User · Answer

Just recently I wrote something like this in Node called markdown-include that allows you to include markdown files with C style syntax, like so:

#include "my-file.md"

I believe this aligns nicely with the question you're asking. I know this an old one, but I wanted to update it at least.

You can include this in any markdown file you wish. That file can also have more includes and markdown-include will make an internal link and do all of the work for you.

You can download it via npm

npm install -g markdown-include

User · Answer

Asciidoc is actually a markdown on steroids  Overall  Asciidoc and Markdown will look very similar and it is rather easy to switch  A huge benefit of Asciidoc over markdown is that it supports includes already  for other Asciidoc files but also for any format you like  You can even partly include files based on line numbers or tags inside your included files  Including other files is really a life saver when you write docs  You can for instance have an asciidoc file with such content      source perl     ----    include  script pl      ----  and maintain your sample in script pl And I am sure you will wonder so yes  Github also supports asciidoc

User · Answer

IMHO  You can get your result by concatenating your input   md files like     pandoc -s -o outputDoc pdf inputDoc1 md inputDoc2 md outputDoc3 md

User · Answer

I use a includes txt file with all my files in the right order the I execute pandoc like this    pandoc -s   cat includes txt  --quiet -f markdown -t html5 --css pandoc css -o index html  Works like a charm

User · Answer

Another HTML-based  client-side solution using markdown-it and jQuery   Below is a small HTML wrapper as a master document  that supports unlimited includes of markdown files  but not nested includes   Explanation is provided in the JS comments  Error handling is omitted    lt script src   markdown-it min js  gt  lt  script gt   lt script src   jquery-3 5 1 min js  gt  lt  script gt    lt script gt       function         var mdit   window markdownit        mdit options html true         Process all div elements of class include   Follow up with custom callback        div include   each  function           var inc     this            Use contents between div tag as the file to be included from server       var filename   inc html             Unable to intercept load   contents   post-process markdown rendering with callback       inc load filename  function              inc html  mdit render this innerHTML                         lt  script gt   lt  head gt    lt body gt   lt h1 gt Master Document  lt  h1 gt    lt h1 gt Section 1 lt  h1 gt   lt div class  include  gt sec 1 md lt  div gt   lt hr  gt   lt h1 gt Section 2 lt  h1 gt   lt div class  include  gt sec 2 md lt  div gt

User · Answer

I use Marked 2 on Mac OS X  It supports the following syntax for including other files     lt  lt  chapters chapter1 md   lt  lt  chapters chapter2 md   lt  lt  chapters chapter3 md   lt  lt  chapters chapter4 md    Sadly  you can t feed that to pandoc as it doesn t understand the syntax  However  writing a script to strip the syntax out to construct a pandoc command line is easy enough

User · Answer

My solution is to use m4  It s supported on most platforms and is included in the binutils package   First include a macro changequote   in the file to change the quoting characters to what you prefer  default is      The macro is removed when the file is processed    changequote             include   other file      On the commandline   m4 -I  dir containing other file  input md  gt   tmp md pandoc -o output html  tmp md

User · Answer

The short answer is no   The long answer is yes    -   Markdown was designed to allow people to write simple  readable text that could be easily converted to a simple HTML markup   It doesn t really do document layout   For example  there s no real way to align an image to the right or left   As to your question  there s no markdown command to include a single link from one file to another in any version of markdown  so far as I know      The closest you could come to this functionality is Pandoc   Pandoc allows you to merge files as a part of the transformation  which allows you to easily render multiple files into a single output   For example  if you were creating a book  then you could have chapters like this   01 preface md 02 introduction md 03 why markdown is useful md 04 limitations of markdown md 05 conclusions md   You can merge them by doing executing this command within the same directory   pandoc   md  gt  markdown book html   Since pandoc will merge all the files prior to doing the translation  you can include your links in the last file like this   01 preface md 02 introduction md 03 why markdown is useful md 04 limitations of markdown md 05 conclusions md 06 links md   So part of your 01 preface md could look like this   I always wanted to write a book with  markdown  mkdnlink     And part of your 02 introduction md could look like this   Let s start digging into  the best text-based syntax  mkdnlink  available    As long as your last file includes the line    mkdnlink   http   daringfireball net projects markdown      the same command used before will perform the merge and conversion while including that link throughout   Just make sure you leave a blank line or two at the beginning of that file   The pandoc documentation says that it adds a blank line between files that are merged this way  but this didn t work for me without the blank line

User · Answer

I would just mention that you can use the cat command to concatenate the input files prior to piping them to markdown py which has the same effect as what pandoc does with multiple input files coming in   cat   md   markdown py  gt  youroutputname html   works pretty much the same as the pandoc example above for the Python version of Markdown on my Mac

User · Answer

Multimarkdown has this natively  It calls it file transclusion     some other file txt     is all it takes  Weird name  but ticks all the boxes

User · Answer

I think we better adopt a new file inclusion syntax  so won t mess up with code blocks  I think the C style inclusion is totally wrong   and I wrote a small tool in Perl  naming cat pl  because it works like cat  cat a txt b txt c txt will merge three files   but it merges files in depth  not in width  How to use     perl cat pl  lt your file gt    The syntax in detail is    recursive include files   include  lt - path  just include one   include  lt - path    It can properly handle file inclusion loops  if a txt  lt - b txt  b txt  lt - a txt  then what you expect     Example   a txt   a txt      a  lt - b       include  lt - b txt   a end   b txt   b txt      b  lt - a       include  lt - a txt   b end   perl cat pl a txt  gt  c txt  c txt   a txt      a  lt - b      b txt          b  lt - a          a txt              a  lt - b               include  lt - b txt   note won t include  because it will lead to infinite loop            a end      b end  a end   More examples at https   github com district10 cat blob master tutorial cat pl  md   I also wrote a Java version having an identical effect  not the same  but close

User · Answer

I know that this is an old question  but I have not seen any answers to this effect  Essentially  if you are using markdown and pandoc to convert your file to pdf  in your yaml data at the top of the page  you can include something like this   --- header-includes  -  usepackage pdfpages  output  pdf document ---   includepdf  path to pdf document pdf     Section  Blah blah     Section   Blah blah    Since pandoc using latex to convert all of your documents  the header-includes section calls the pdfpages package  Then when you include  includepdf  path to pdf document pdf  it will insert whatever is include in that document  Furthermore  you can include multiple pdf files this way   As a fun bonus  and this is only because I often use markdown  if you would like to include files other than markdown  for instance latex files  I have modified this answer somewhat  Say that you have a markdown file markdown1 md   --- title  Something meaning full author  Talking head ---    And two addtional latex file document1  that looks like this    section Section   Profundity    subsection Section   Razor s edge    And another  document2 tex  that looks like this    section Section  Glah   subsection Section   Balh Balh   Assuming that you want to include document1 tex and document2 tex into markdown1 md  you would just do this to markdown1 md  --- title  Something meaning full author  Talking head ---   input  path to document1   input  path to document2    Run pandoc over it  e g   in terminal pandoc markdown1 md -o markdown1 pdf  Your final document will look somewhat like this   Something Meaning Full  Talking Head  Section  Profundity   Section  Razor s edge   Section  Glah  Section  Balh Balh

User · Answer

I m actually surprised that no one in this page has offered any HTML solutions  As far I have understood MarkDown files can include wide portion  if not all  of HTML tags  So follow these steps    From here  put your MarkDown files in  lt span style  display block  gt       lt  span gt  tags to be sure they will be rendered as markdown  You have a whole lot of other style properties you can add  The one I like is the text-align justify  From here  Include the files in your main file using the  lt iframe src   path to file md  seamless gt  lt  iframe gt    P S 1  this solution does not work on all MarkDown engines   renders  For example Typora did render the files correctly but Visual Studio Code didn t  It would be great if others could share their experience with other platforms  Specially I would like to hear about GitHub and GitLab      P S 2  On further investigation there seems to be major incompatibility issues leading to this not being properly rendered on many platforms  including Typora  GitHub and Visual Studio code  Please do not use this till I resolve them  I will not delete the answer just for the sake of discussion and if maybe you can share your opinions    P S 3  To further investigate this issue I have asked this questions here on StackOverflow and here on Reddit    P S 4  After some through study  I came to the conclusion that for the moment AsciiDoc is  a better option for documentation  It comes with built-in include functionality  it is rendered by GitHub  and major code editors like Atom and vscode have extensions for live preview  One can use Pandoc or other tools to automatically convert existing MarkDown Code to AsciiDoc with minor changes    P S 5  Another lightweight markup language with built-in include functionality is reStructuredText  It comes with    include   inclusion txt  syntax by standard  There is ReText editor with live preview as well

User · Answer

You can actually use the Markdown Preprocessor  MarkdownPP    Running with the hypothetical book example from the other answers  you would create  mdpp files representing your chapters  The  mdpp files can then use the  INCLUDE  path to file mdpp  directive  which operates recursively replacing the directive with the contents of the referenced file in the final output   chapters preface mdpp chapters introduction mdpp chapters why markdown is useful mdpp chapters limitations of markdown mdpp chapters conclusions mdpp   You would then need an index mdpp that contained the following    INCLUDE  chapters preface mdpp   INCLUDE  chapters introduction mdpp   INCLUDE  chapters why markdown is useful mdpp   INCLUDE  chapters limitations of markdown mdpp   INCLUDE  chapters conclusions mdpp    To render your book you simply run the preprocessor on index mdpp     markdown-pp py index mdpp mybook md   Don t forget to look at the readme mdpp in the MarkdownPP repository for an exposition of preprocessor features suited for larger documentation projects

User · Answer

The  import  syntax is supported in vscode-markdown-preview-enhanced https   github com shd101wyy vscode-markdown-preview-enhanced which probably means its part of the the underlying tool mume https   github com shd101wyy mume and other tools built on mume https   github com gabyx TechnicalMarkdown

User · Answer

In fact you can use  input filename  and  include filename  which are latex commands  directly in Pandoc  because it supports nearly all html and latex syntax   But beware  the included file will be treated as latex file  But you can compile your markdown to latex with Pandox easily

[markdown] Markdown and including multiple files

Examples related to markdown