markwright

A small (<10 KB), single-dependency¹ React library for automagically typesetting Markdown documents.

$ npm i markwright

Basic usage:

import Markwright from 'markwright';
import { createRoot } from 'react-dom/client';

const res = await fetch('/moby-dick.md');
const text = await res.text();

createRoot(document.getElementById('main'))
  .render(<Markwright value={text} />);

Styling and HTML structure

Markwright's default stylesheet is a good starter for minimalist documents. Page and margin sizes can be set with the following CSS variables.

--page-height: 11in;
--page-width: 8.5in;
--margin-inner: 0.5in;
--margin-outer: 0.5in;
--margin-top: 0.5in;
--margin-bottom: 0.5in;

More complex styles can take advantage of Markwright's unopinionated HTML output and custom CSS.

.section section-n
  .page page-n
    .header
    .body
      .content
      .footnotes
    .footer

Markdown extensions

A handful of helpful features have been added to the Markdown parser used by Markwright. These include footnotes and content blocks.

Footnotes

Markwright supports GFM-style footnotes². They're automatically inserted into the containing page's .footnotes container and reset after each page.

Blocks

Colon-fenced containers (:::) create <div /> elements for nesting content. This creates a container with the class name after the first colons.

::: foo
Block accessible as `div.foo`.
:::

This allows you to more explicitly separate sidebars, &c. from body content.

Breaks

Along with the standard line-break (<br />), two custom elements enable page and column breaks.

• <br-page />: page break
• <br-col />: column break in a multi-column layout

Caveat emptor, inserting a column break into a page's final column may have unpredictable effects.

Footnotes

1. Excluding react and react-dom. ↩

2. See the GitHub docs for more information. ↩