literate-postcss

Write CSS documentation with Markdown and then transform it into CSS.

Install

With npm do:

npm install literate-postcss --save

Examples

See the examples directory for some ideas on how you can use literate-postcss. If you're using literate-postcss for your styles, please feel free to get in touch and we'll list your site here.

API

literate-postcss

literate-postcss allows you to write Markdown files with embedded CSS code, and then transform them into a format that can be processed by PostCSS. It's a way of writing stylesheets that is more like a short-form article, and is great for documentation focused use cases such as style guides or pattern libraries.

Because this tool is based on open standards, there's no new language that you need to learn, or plugin that you need to install in your editor to enable syntax highlighting, beyond support for CSS & Markdown. If you use Atom, for instance, there's a Markdown preview that works extremely well with this format.

Writing CSS in this way allows you to take any Markdown previewer to your styles and instantly transform them into beautiful documentation. There's no docblock convention to follow, and you can write as much or as little supporting text as you would like. You can also use headings and links to help structure and add meaning to your stylesheet.

The following parsers have been tested and are known to work out of the box:

• postcss' default parser.
• postcss-less
• postcss-safe-parser
• postcss-scss
• sugarss

Note that as literate-postcss is a wrapper for the PostCSS options object, it should not be used as a traditional plugin. See the examples for details.

Parameters

• opts [Object] Same as the PostCSS options, plus:
  • opts.start [String] This string is used to begin the comment block.
  • opts.middle [String] This string is prepended to each comment block line, other than the start & end lines.
  • opts.end [String] This string is used to end the comment block.
  • opts.stripComments [Boolean] Setting to true removes any non-code blocks when parsing Markdown. Note that this option does not analyse comments within code blocks and therefore will not strip them. (optional, default false)
  • opts.languages [Array] This sets the languages that will not be converted into comments, and should be anything that a PostCSS parser is capable of parsing. (optional, default ['css','less','scss','sss'])

Examples

Basic usage

import postcss from 'postcss';
import literate from 'literate-postcss';
 
const markdown = `# Hello!
 
    h1 {
        color: blue;
    }`;
 
postcss().process(markdown, literate()).then(result => {
    console.log(result.content);
    // /*
    //  * # Hello!
    //  *\/
    // h1 {
    //     color: blue;
    // }
});

Usage with postcss-less

import postcss from 'postcss';
import less from 'postcss-less-engine';
import literate from 'literate-postcss';
 
const markdown = `# Hello!
 
    h1 {
        width: (1 + 1);
    }`;
 
postcss(less).process(markdown, literate({parser: less.parser})).then(result => {
    console.log(result.content);
    // /* * # Hello! *\/
    // h1 {
    //     width: 2;
    // }
});

Usage with postcss-scss

import postcss from 'postcss';
import scss from 'postcss-scss';
import literate from 'literate-postcss';
 
const markdown = `# Hello!
 
    .#{class} {
        color: blue;
    }`;
 
postcss().process(markdown, literate({syntax: scss})).then(result => {
    console.log(result.content);
    // /*
    //  * # Hello!
    //  *\/
    // .#{class} {
    //     color: blue;
    // }
});

Usage with sugarss

import postcss from 'postcss';
import sugarss from 'sugarss';
import literate from 'literate-postcss';
 
const markdown = `# Hello!
 
    h1
        color: blue
`;
 
postcss().process(markdown, literate({syntax: sugarss})).then(result => {
    console.log(result.content);
    // /*
    //  * # Hello! *\/
    // h1
    //     color: blue
});

Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Ben Briggs 💻 📖 👀 ⚠️

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

License

MIT © Ben Briggs