About

MaxText is a text processing system similar to Markdown. It was originally developed to generate Latex, but now can also generate HTML.

Generally, MaxText looks at the first character of each line to determine whether to create a special paragraph; or looks at the first letter, or last letter, of each token to determine whether to start or finish sub-line formatting (such as italicisation).

Download

Max Text may be downloaded using the link below:
Download MaxText

Install

To install follow the instructions below. Note: it doesn't really matter where you unpack the source; all you need to do is ensure that the 'maxtext' executable is on the path. 'max2html' and 'max2tex' are convenience links that are synonomus with specifying "--format html", or "--format tex".

cd ~
wget http://www.maxtext.org/client/maxtext/resources/downloads/MaxText-1.0.tar.bz2
cd /opt
tar jxvf ~/MaxText-1.0.tar.bz2
cd MaxText/1.0.0/maxtext
make
ln -s /opt/MaxText/1.0.0/maxtext/bin/maxtext /opt/bin/maxtext
ln -s /opt/MaxText/1.0.0/maxtext/bin/maxtext /opt/bin/max2html
ln -s /opt/MaxText/1.0.0/maxtext/bin/maxtext /opt/bin/max2tex

Usage

The following command would process all the files in the 'content' directory, and create a 'document.htm' file.

maxtext --format html --out document.htm content/*.txt

If the '--content-only' argument is passed, only the body content is written, not the head element or the enclosing HTML element.

maxtext --format html --out content.htm content/*.txt

Brief Example

The following sections gives a brief overview of the markup used.

Document Front Matter

The title and author of a document is indicated using hyphens.

-       An overview of the Max Text system
--      D. Bradley (daniel@crossadative.com)

Headings

Headings are indicated using consecutive periods, e.g. ('.'). For example, a top-level heading has one dot, and a second-level has two, and so on.

. Heading 1
.. Heading 2

Blockquote

Blockquotes are created by using a bar ('|') symbol on a line.

|
Blocked text here.
|

Preformatted Text

Pre-formatted text is created using a tilde ('~') symbol on a line.

~
func my_function( x )
{
    return x * 2;
}
~

Bullet points

Prefixing a line with an 'o' will create a bullet list.

o   One
o   Two
o   Three

Numbered lists

Prefixing a line with a number and a right curved bracket, i.e., ')', will create a numbered list.

1)   First item
2)   Second item
3)   Third item