texts.js is a JavaScript library (for Node and for browser) that implements conversion between various “rich” text formats. It does the conversion via universal text model (TextJSON, see below) that is rich enough for most of the texts, yet simple.
Current version of texts.js supports reading of Text (Markdown subset), Pandoc JSON and writing of Text, HTML5, XeLaTeX and Pandoc JSON formats.
$ npm install texts
$ texts --from text --to html5
*Hello* world!
^D
<p><em>Hello<em> world!</p>
For information on options use the following command.
texts --help
Text format produced and recognized by texts.js is similar to Markdown but is not tied to the generation of HTML. The purpose of Text format to represent a structure that can be published in any text format. The major differences from Markdown are:
-
no support for inline HTML,
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explicit format definition (in form of PEG grammar),
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one variation of markup for each style.
The following paragraph styles are supported:
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headings,
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bulleted and numbered lists,
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quotations,
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verbatim (code) blocks,
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math formulas,
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images,
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footnotes,
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hyperlinks.
There is also intention to make Text format a bit more rational. For example, indentation in Markdown can represent either structure (second paragraph in a list) or style (verbatim block). In Text format indentation represents text structure only.
Files in the Text format can be edited in any plain text editor or in a WYSIWYM editor Texts.
TextJSON is the format of the universal text model in text.js. It is based on JsonML, format for structured data. Any TextJSON document is a valid JSON document and thus can be easily produced or consumed in any programming language.
Each TextJSON object is a 2-level structure—an array of blocks, where each block is an array of spans. Above them is a formal root element “text”. Each block has attribute “level” with zero being the level of the main text, positive levels for nested elements and negative levels for headings.
$ texts --from text --to json
*Hello* world!
^D
["text",
["para", { "level": 0 },
["emph", "Hello"],
["plain", " world!"]
]
]