Jotdown

Jotdown is a structured document language. It is an opinionated, augmented subset of Markdown with features inspired by plain-text organizational tools like org-mode. The main purpose of Jotdown is to centralize personal and project organization into a set of plain-text documents that can be easily edited, parsed, and manipulated both by scripts and humans alike.

Jotdown is offered simultaneously as a header-only C++ library and a compiled Python module sharing the same code. The Python bindings are enabled via pybind11. It is released under an MIT license, see LICENSE for more info.

See [DOCUMENTATION.md] for a detailed explanation of the language and its features.

See [API_CXX.md] for documentation regarding the header-only C++ library.

See [API_PY.md] for documentation regarding the Python module, including how to build and install it.

Goals

These are the primary goals of the Jotdown language and project:

• Support the creation, analysis, and modification of plain-text structured documents.
• Support the hypertext linkage of documents within a document-set, and to outside resources on the web or elsewhere.
• First-class support for loading, querying, modifying, saving, and creating documents in C++ and Python.

Q/A

Why not just use Markdown for this?

While Markdown is great as a text formatting language, it doesn't work as an easily parsable structured document language. It's main focus has always been generating HTML, and as such many of the existing parsers don't even bother creating an intermediate AST. I also feel that Markdown, though it is formally defined in the CommonMark and Github Flavored Markdown specs, has hugely complex rules for parsing to support features that aren't often used or don't need to exist.

Why is Jotdown offered in C++ and Python?

I wanted to be able to support the runtime power and expressiveness of C++ while also extending support into Python where scripts and plugins can be easily built around Jotdown document structures.

Why is my language not supported?

I'm sorry! I'm really happy you're interested in Jotdown though. Feel free to submit an issue to add support for your language. I can't guarantee I'll ever get around to writing bindings myself, but someone in the community might step up and help out!

What are you planning to do with Jotdown in the future?

Some things I'm planning on building around Jotdown include:

• A Vim plugin which will support advanced editing features and highlighting.
• Command line productivity tools built around the concept of a Jotdown document set.
• A web wiki built around the concept of a Jotdown document set.

Change Log

01/24/2021: v2.0.0

• Removed support for custom '@' style links, replaced with Markdown style links and link indexes.

07/24/2020: v1.3.0

• Added support for document front-matter.
• New features for the Python interface:
  • Collections are now callable. With no arguments, calling them will return their contents as a list. With arguments, they will return themselves with all of the arguments being added in sequence.
  • Section can now be constructed with a string or a TextContent for the header.
  • TextContent can now be initialized with a string.

07/17/2020: v1.2.0

• Refactored objects.h to do runtime validation of insertion types rather than limiting via the C++ type system to reduce code duplication.
• Added Container::insert_before and Container::insert_after.