Limp: the lightweight and extensible document markup language

Limp is a lightweight markup language for creating documents.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Introduction

Limp has only 3 basic rules to markup a document:

1. Heading
2. Inline Roles
3. Block Roles

Roles are the essential part of limp: they mark a text how it means in the document. For instance, the ref role indicates the text is a (hyper-)reference, and the label role denotes the text is a significant point in the document and may be referred to.

Heading

Limp has four levels of headings:

Heading 1
=========

Heading 2
---------

Heading 3
*********

Heading 4
#########

Those are compiled to:

<h1>Heading 1</h1>

<h2>Heading 2</h2>

<h3>Heading 3</h3>

<h4>Heading 4</h4>

h5 and h6 are not supported. But you can add your own custom headings by adding custom roles and renderers.

Inline Roles

Inline role is a way to mark a text with a role. A text segment like :bold:this is bold text; is a very example of inline role. Renderers handle inline roles and block roles, and each of the different roles has a very different display.

Note you can make custom renderers and use them in your project to process your document.

Block Roles

Block role is another way to mark a text with a role. In contrast to inline roles, block roles mark up a chunk of texts.

For example:

::*code~

  This is a example of code block.

::list~

  ::item~

    This is a example of list item.

  ::item~

    This is another example of list item.

Blocks are indicated by an indentation consisting of some spaces (code point 0x20). Note tab characters are not counted and ignored when the limp parser measures the indentation level of a line. When some "dedents" appear and the indentation level turned to the same or less level as the start of the block, it is the end of the block.

The above example are shown like this:

This is a example of code block.

1. This is a example of list item.
2. This is another example of list item.

Unparsed Marker

A role or role block can have an unparsed marker. You can use this marker to mark a text segment, force the parser not to parse and treat the containing text as plain text. This functionality shall be helpful with code roles or implementing custom embedded metadata roles.

Example:

::*comment~
  code role with unparsed marker:

::*code~
  :u:This is a :i:example; of :b:code; block.;

::*comment~
  code role without unparsed marker:

::code~
  :u:This is a :i:example; of :b:code; block.;

Output:

:u:This is a :i:example; of :b:code; block.;

<u>This is a <i>example</i> of <b>code</b> block.</u>

Default Roles

Limp has a default set of some roles:

1. Image
2. Block Code
3. List
4. Table
5. Comments
6. Block Quote
7. Details/Spoiler

Here is a complete table of inline roles and their appearance:

Image

img role is a way to embed an image in the document. This role has 3 attributes:

Example:

:img(image_url)::;

:img(image_url, "alternative text")::;

:img(image_url, "alternative text")::;

:img(image_url, alt="alternative text", title="tooltip text")::;

Block Code

code role is a way to embed a code block in the document. You should use this role with * unparsed marker.

Example:

::*code~
  # This is a Python code

  import sys

  print([line.split(','): for line in sys.stdin])

Output:

# This is a Python code

import sys

print([line.split(','): for line in sys.stdin])