doc-utils

doc-utils is a set of Javascript utilities designed for a variety of tasks related to managing documents such as blog posts. It is particularly useful when you don't have access to the rich plugin library available for remark, rehype, and retext.

Installation

doc-utils can be installed like any other NPM package.

npm install doc-utils

Usage

Headings

doc-utils contains a processing system for headers in which headers are parsed into a tree and processed. Which headers are processed are determined by a combination of a data attribute and valid heading elements. Currently, 4 'steps' are available:

1. slugs — Generate and add IDs to heading elements
2. autolink — Automatically wrap heading elements in tags which link to the heading's ID
3. toc — Automatically generate a table of contents with support for different classes at each level or a default set of classes
4. enumerate — Add data-header-levels to header elements describing their level (e.g. 1, 1.1)

Basic usage

import {processHeadings, slugs, autoLink, toc} from 'doc-utils/headings.js'

processHeadings([slugs(), autoLink(), toc()])

It is important to note that each step is run in the order it is passed. For this reason, it is important to generate slugs before either of the other plugins run as they both rely on the header elements having IDs.

Customising header selection

By default, processHeadings will select header elements from <h1> to <h6> with the attribute data-doc-utils="true". This can be customised by passing configuration to processHeadings

processHeadings([slugs(), autoLink(), toc()], {
                dataAttribute: 'data-toc="true"', headers: ["h1", "h2", "h3"]
                });

Planned features

Step system

Currently, the system used by the header processing is entirely specific to header elements. It would be ideal to have a generic system which is based on ASTs (hast or nlcst). This hypothetical step system would track the root node of the AST in the DOM and use it to synchronize updates between the AST and the DOM. Basically, the goal is a generic step system which:

• Works with hast or nlcst
• Allows generic targeting of elements by plugins
• Can synchronise ASTs and rendered content
• Orders steps based on the elements and properties they modify and depend on

Natural language features

In addition to HTML processing, natural language processing using nlcst would be highly useful. One immediately obvious use case is finding keywords and keyphrases. However, expanding contractions and other features could also be implemented.