mystjs

MyST (Markedly Structured Text) is designed to create publication-quality documents written entirely in Markdown. The main use case driving the development and design of MyST is JupyterBook, which helps you create educational online textbooks and tutorials with Jupyter Notebooks and narrative content written in MyST. mystjs is a javascript parser for MyST markdown that brings these capabilities into a web-native environment.

Goals

• Provide a Javascript implementation of MyST markdown
• Parse MyST into a standardized AST, based on mdast.
• Serialize mdast into a default HTML for all known roles and directives
• Expose an opinionated set of markdown-it plugins, to be used in ecosystems that require markdown-it (e.g. vscode)
• Expose extension points in MyST for new roles/directives
• Provide functionality for cross-referencing that is usually completed by Sphinx (e.g. in the Python implementation)

Usage

npm install mystjs

In a node environment:

import { MyST } from 'mystjs';

const myst = new MyST();
const html = myst.render('# Hello to the world!');

console.log(html);
&gt;&gt; "<h1>Hello to the world!</h1>"

In a browser:

  
    
  
  
    <div id="output"></div>
    
  

mystjs Features

• CommonMark
• Admonitions
• Figures
• Images
• Math
  • role
  • directive (equations)
  • dollar math
  • amsmath
• Tables
  • GFM
  • List Tables
• References
  • ref
  • numref
  • eq
  • links
  • Including numbering (single document)
• Code Directives
  • Code
  • Code blocks
  • Code cell
• Blocks
• Comments
• Targets
• HTML:
  • sub
  • sup
  • abbr
• Definition List
• Footnotes

Not yet complete:

• div
• proof
• margin
• sidebar
• colon fence
• Citations
• Bibliography
• Epigraph
• Glosary
• Terms
• Tabs
• Panels
• CSV Tables
• Multi-document

Developer Install

For installing the package locally, you will need node and npm, both can use a global install on your system.

Once you have npm installed globally, navigate into this project folder and install the dependencies:

cd mystjs
npm install
npm run start  # Start a development server to play with the library! 🚀

The scripts for building, testing, and serving the project are in the package.json, the main ones to use are npm run test, npm run build, and npm run start.

npm run build

Builds the library, including compiling the typescript and bundling/minification to create myst.min.js which can be used in the browser directly. Additionally, index.cjs.js is created which bundles ESM dependencies like unified, which can be helpful for tooling (e.g. jest) that can struggle with ESM modules. This outputs to the dist folder, and also includes all type definitions (*.d.ts) in the types folder.

npm run test

Run the tests, these are mostly based on the fixtures folder. You can also use npm run test:watch to run on any file changes.

npm run start

Starts a server for manually testing and playing with mystjs, this uses a in-memory bundle of what would go in the dist folder. Note that this does not actually build the library!