mdbook-fs-summary

A preprocessor that generates a summary from the file structure of your book rather than using an explicit SUMMARY.md file.

Benefits

Frequently, you want the organization of your files to simply be mirrored in the SUMMARY.md file rather than have to manually set it yourself. We can automate this by following a few conventions:

These conventions should create a filesystem structure that, when sorted alphanumerically, is the same in the final render.

00_prologue.md                    → prefix chapter
01_intro.md
02_install/
├─ 00.md                          → chapter index 
├─ 01_linux.md
├─ 02_mac.md                      ↓ files sorted naturally
├─ 03_windows.md
├─ 04_______                      → separator
├─ 05_post_install.md
├─ _common_install_tips.md        → ignored "partial"
03_caveat.md
04_##_guide_##.md                 → part title 
05_usage.md/
├─ 00.md
├─ 01_basics/
│  ├─ 00.md
│  ├─ 01_setup.md
│  ├─ 02_monitoring.md
06_administration()/              → draft chapter
├─ 00.md
├─ 01_install().md                → nested draft chapter
ZZ_final_words.md                 → suffix chapter

Usage

You must create a dummy SUMMARY.md, otherwise mdbook will error out before the preprocessors get called. (The contents aren't important. It can just have # SUMMARY as the first line.)

Install the project with cargo. The current version is v0.2.1.

cargo install mdbook-fs-summary

There aren't a lot of configurations right now.

# book.toml

[preprocessor.fs-summary]
# (default: true)
clean-paths = true

# other preprocessors will naturally need to 
# run after the summary has been generated 
[preprocessor.links]
after = ["fs-summary"] 

Clean Paths

We are using filename indicators to apply configurations to the generated summary. That's not ideal, so they are stripped to their natural paths.

Instead of:

http://localhost:3000/02_team/05_onboarding.html

We strip the numeric prefixes used for sorting and any other artificial indicators.

http://localhost:3000/team/onboarding.html

⚠️ Cleaning paths currently breaks support for the default links preprocessor provided by mdbook. See this pull request. It is recommended to disable clean paths until this is resolved if you intend to use partials.

Disable Clean Paths

You can turn off this behavior.

[preprocessor.fs-summary]
clean-paths = false

[preprocessor.links]
after = ["fs-summary"]

Numeric Prefix Format

This processor doesn't dictate any special format for numeric prefixes used for sorting except when cleaning paths. Currently the convention is this:

If the filename starts with 2 or 3 numbers or upper case letters followed by an underscore, they'll get stripped in the resulting URLs.

This is just something to note if you plan on some other sorting strategy for your filenames.

Alternatives

• mdbook-auto-gen-summary - Similar goals with different conventions and writes the resulting table of contents to SUMMARY.md.