Chute

To easen writing for the web, Kvarn offers a tool called Chute. It consumes Markdown documents and produces HTML documents.

Chute is a CLI tool. Downloads are available. Nightly Linux downloads are available on GitHub actions.

Contents
1 Chute
1.1 Present extensions
1.1.1 Hide exception
1.1.2 Templates
1.2 Anchors
1.3 Tags
1.3.1 Table of contents
1.3.2 Escaping
1.4 head\>
1.5 Issues with square brackets \

Present extensions

Using Present extensions gives you power to control the content of the document. Chute is smart and merges the present extensions in the MD file and the hard-coded template HTML document. This allows you to specify any present extensions, just as you would in HTML.

Hide exception

If you define the hide extension in your Markdown document (e.g. !> hide\n...) the Markdown document is hidden from the website.

Chute removes this extension when merging.

To also hide the HTML, you can specify it twice (e.g. !> hide &> hide).

Templates

Using the templating engine, you can easily build a website structure with Chute.

See the page linked above for more details.

Chute inserts some templates before and after the content automatically. Before dependencies: !> tmpl standard.html markdown.html\n$[head]
After dependencies: $[dependencies]$[md-imports]$[close-head]$[navigation]\n<main><md>
After body: </md></main>\n$[footer]\

Anchors

Chute sets the id of all headings to their content. The heading is converted to lower-case and non-alphanumerical symbols are replaced by hyphens -.

This means you can link to headings of your document. The above link was written as [link to headings](#anchors) in Markdown source.

Tags

Chute supports several special tags. They have the format ${tag}. If a tag doesn’t exist in the internal list, or is escaped, it’s simply left intact.

If you use ${toc}, Chute outputs a table of contents from the headings in your document.

Escaping

As you may have noticed, I was able to write ${toc} in the document. That’s because you can escape tags by inserting a backslash (\) before the tag: \${tag}.

To write \${tag} in a document, you have to do the following: \<zero-width space>\${tag}. This is caused by Chute parsing the Markdown source and looking for tags and escapes. If two successive backslashes \ are found, it expands the tag as usual. In normal Markdown, this is converted to a single backslash. In code blocks, however, Markdown doesn’t remove the extra backslash. We therefore insert a character in between to make Chute escape the last backslash, but only leave one. The zero-width space makes sure it isn’t visible when viewing the document.

<head>

If you need to insert items into the <head> of your document, simply define it at the top:

The present extensions are not required for this to work.

!> hide &> my-present-extension

<head>
    <title>Fun article</title>
</head>

Text...

Issues with square brackets $[]

When using square brackets (often found in Rust code and Cargo.toml files), the Kvarn templating engine tries to find a template. The text will therefore disappear and issues arise. You can escape this using two backslashes in Markdown source: $[] or one backslash in code segments.