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TODO

Improvement ideas for mdBook

  • Index Hebrew text as well https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/issues/2393
  • Remove .html extension
  • syntax highlighting: generate the highlight.js when building the book?
  • Check which files are not in use?
  • Avoid including the same page twice.
  • Allow searching for special symbols. e.g. What does ? mean in Ruby or Rust?
  • mdbook test reports lots of errors when run on this book. Shouldn't it skip everything as there is no rust code here?
  • Verify that every page has a title - the first line starting with a single #
  • Allow the inclusion of front matter in yaml or toml format
  • Eliminate the need to duplicate the page title in the md file of the page and the summary.
  • Warn if the same file is included twice via SUMMARY.md - right now it is just accepted.
  • Check that all the (internal) links work.
  • Reread the .gitignore file if it changed while serve is running. (e.g. if I add *.swp later) (same with watch, I guess)
  • What happens if SUMMARY.md is missing?
  • Should we check the case of SUMMARY.md (so people on Windows won't be surprised if Summary.md works on their computer but not on Linux?

Topics to be covered

pandoc on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install pandoc texlive

pandoc myfile.md -o output.pdf

https://crates.io/keywords/mdbook

  • How to make it easier for book readers to find the hidden keys?

    • Pressing the right and left arrows move the book to the next and the previous pages. (and it works the other way around in RTL books)
    • Pressing s open the search window.

  • Lines starting with ## in the summary file are ignored, Maybe they can be designated as comments? Or can we have other comments? e.g. <!-- -->?

  • What is controlled by the language configuration option? Besides the direction (RTL, LTR?) and how come we can use any text there including "xyz" ?

  • Update the code highlighting in the mdbook, and add detailed explanation to https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/format/theme/syntax-highlighting.html on how to add a replacement highlighting.js file.

Error

given the following SUMMARY.md

# Summary

- [next](Home](./index)

I get this error

$ mdbook build
2025-03-02 15:11:15 [WARN] (mdbook::book::summary): Expected a start of a link, actually got Some(Text(Borrowed("[")))
2025-03-02 15:11:15 [ERROR] (mdbook::utils): Error: Summary parsing failed for file="/home/gabor/work/exercises.code-mave.com/src/SUMMARY.md"
2025-03-02 15:11:15 [ERROR] (mdbook::utils): 	Caused By: There was an error parsing the numbered chapters
2025-03-02 15:11:15 [ERROR] (mdbook::utils): 	Caused By: There was an error parsing the numbered chapters
2025-03-02 15:11:15 [ERROR] (mdbook::utils): 	Caused By: failed to parse SUMMARY.md line 3, column 3: The link items for nested chapters must only contain a hyperlink

I the Rust Some(Text(Borrowed there looks bad

command line test

  • What happens if there are two separeators in the SUMMARY one after the other?
# One
# Two
- [Page](./page.md)

  • Include the time the book was generated. Either in the footer or on one of the pages.

  • Include a front-image.

  • Document what extensions can be the files referred to in the SUMMARY.md ? .md works, but if we leave out the extension that also works. If the extension is html then I think it is not processed etc.

  • We can use {{#include file/path }} to include file from pathes outside of the book, but currently serve does not watch changes to those files. Watch files from outside the tree.

  • Turn on more logging:

RUST_LOG=mdbook=debug mdbook build

and even more logging:

RUST_LOG=mdbook=trace mdbook build

also in the dependencies of mdbook:

RUST_LOG mdbook build