CommonDoc is a library of classes for representing structured documents. It's completely independent of input or output formats, and provides operations for inspecting and manipulating documents.
Features
- Separation of Concerns
Parsers for Markdown and other markup languages generally implement their internal representation of document structure, and code to transform it directly to one or more output formats. Generally, every parser has a different internal representation, a different set of supported backends, each in various degrees of completeness.
What CommonDoc provides is a way to separate parser and emitter by providing a common framework for representing documents. Parsers and emitters can be written to convert text to and from various markup languages (Markdown, Textile, ReST, etc.) while keeping a single, backend-agnostic internal representation.
- Macros
- CommonDoc has macro nodes that can be expanded to other nodes, and has built-in nodes for including external text files, rendering gnuplot graphs, among other things.
- Operations
- CommonDoc provides operations that modify or extract information from documents, and because of the input/output-agnostic design work for all documents.
Use Cases
Documentation
The Codex documentation generation (used to build this manual) uses CommonDoc to represent the documentation as well as parse docstrings, and build highly customizable user and programer documentation for Common Lisp projects.
Document Conversion
CommonDoc defines input and output parsers for each input format, making it an ideal tool to convert documents from one markup format to the other.
Wiki
CommonDoc, along with CommonHTML, can be used as the backend of a wiki system.
Motivation
This library can be considered an implementation of Robert Strandh's suggestion for the creation of a library for representing documents:
The purpose of this project is to create a library that defines a set of classes and generic functions that allow some client code to create and manipulate a document. Contrary to the types of systems cited above, the specification of this system is thus in terms of what kind of objects it manipulates, and what functions exist to manipulate them.
A library like this can then be used both by an application that reads some markup syntax and produces the document in the form of a graph of class instances, and by an interactive application that allows the user to create the document by issuing gestures. In fact, it will be possible to create several different application with different markups and with a different set of possible gestures.