The Psychotic Network Ferret on Nostr: I wrote a tool many years ago, called it dokumatix. I wrote it half because I wanted ...

I wrote a tool many years ago, called it dokumatix.

I wrote it half because I wanted more flexibility in my note taking, and half because I thought it would be funny.

It's a UNIX command line, filesystem oriented, document creation system.

...

Allow me to explain.

You create an output directory, preferably on a webserver. I just run apache on my desktop. All your documents will appear here in a basic index.

Then, you create a new directory, cd into it, and run dokumatix -i. This instantiates a new document build tree. If you run dokumatix (no i flag this time) anywhere under this directory, it will rebuild the entire document and shove the output to the configured web root.

You create clickable sections of the document by creating directories in the format "XX-Section-Name" where XX is a number that will be used as a sort order. The dashes after will be converted to spaces, and the remaining name used in the document as section headers.

This supports nesting, and will create a table of contents at the top of the document. The body of the doc will also be created following the same structure.

Inside directories is the meat and potatoes. Files are created with the form "XX-arbitraryName.extension." The XX is again, used as a sort order, the name is ignored, and just for keeping the pre-document self documenting. The work is done by the extensions. There are about 30 options right now. The most basic is just .html, which just gets sucked into the final document. There are basic ones like .ulist and .olist, which make every new line in the file a new entry into an unnumbered or ordinal list. Images can be imported, .dot files are parsed by graphviz and converted to png format. I have created quote formats, iFrames, tables, you name it. Aside from images, the entire thing is basic text, and the most quote unquote markdown you may need is : for field separators in tables, return carriage for new lines and lists, and the occasional use of <b> or <i>.

It takes all of your files, sorts them, builds a TOC, and produces a consistent looking document. You build the entire thing with mkdir, cd, mv, cp, and your $EDITOR. Want to reorder some things? Rename files to change the sort order. Need a spell checker? Install one and run it. Want to make it print ready? Open it in your web browser and save it as a PDF.

I wrote this as a goof in the days after I left $weDropPackets in 2016 because I needed a project and it sounded funny. It has become my defacto tool for brain dumping. It works how my brain works; I like UNIX, it is very UNIX like. It even works well for final documents; I have successfully imported the HTML output into a WYSIWYG editor, tweaked it, and presented it to top tier management.

Does _anybody_ but me care? Be awesome to get some help with stuff I don't know well. Maybe introduce CSS support. I absolutely suuuuuck at HTML, and the stuff this thing produces might pass 3.2 validation.

Oh, and it is 100% Perl, and the original code was written while I was drunk.