cmark(1)

💖 cmark(1) — the General Commands Manual, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about cmark — it's the Unix manual page for cmark, and it's lowkey one of the most useful little tools you'll ever meet. no cap.

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✨ NAME ✨

cmark — convert CommonMark formatted text to HTML 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

cmark [options] file*

like, that's it. that's the whole vibe. you give it options, you give it files, it does its thing. 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the tea 🍓: cmark takes Markdown formatted plain text and converts it into HTML, groff man, CommonMark XML, LaTeX, or CommonMark — using the conventions described in the CommonMark spec. it's giving "one tool, five glow-ups."

where does it get its input? either from stdin, or from the files you list (and if you list more than one, bestie, it concatenates their contents — yes, mashes them together). and where does the output go? straight to stdout. iconic behavior. 👑

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --to, -t FORMAT — pick your output format, queen. the options are html, man, xml, latex, commonmark. choose your fighter. 🌈
• --width WIDTH — sets the column width that the output wraps at. want no wrapping at all? use the value 0 — and guess what, that's the default anyway. ngl, this option currently only does anything for the commonmark, latex, and man renderers. the others are just standing there. 💀
• --hardbreaks — renders soft breaks (those newlines inside paragraphs in the CommonMark source) as hard line breaks in the target format. ⚠️ heads up though: if you use this, hard wrapping gets disabled for CommonMark output, no matter what value you handed to --width. it's a package deal, babe.
• --nobreaks — renders soft breaks as spaces instead. and yeah, if you specify this one, hard wrapping is disabled for all output formats, regardless of whatever you gave --width. she said "no wrapping, periodt." 🚫
• --sourcepos — include the source position attribute. tracking where everything came from. very main character energy. 📍
• --validate-utf8 — validates UTF-8, and replaces any illegal sequences with U+FFFD. cleaning up the mess fr fr. 🧚
• --smart — turns on smart punctuation ✨:
  • straight double and single quotes get rendered as curly quotes, depending on where they sit
  • -- becomes an en-dash
  • --- becomes an em-dash
  • ... becomes ellipses
• --safe — omits raw HTML and potentially dangerous URLs. this is the default, bestie, so it's already protecting you. raw HTML gets replaced by a placeholder comment, and potentially dangerous URLs get replaced by empty strings. which URLs are "potentially dangerous"? the ones that begin with javascript:, vbscript:, file:, or data: — EXCEPT for image/png, image/gif, image/jpeg, or image/webp mime types, those are fine. 🛡️
• --unsafe — renders raw HTML and potentially dangerous URLs, overriding the default (--safe) behavior. > ⚠️ bestie be careful, this is literally the "turn off the safety rails" button. know what you're doing before you press it. 🔥
• --help — prints usage information. when in doubt, ask for help. we love a self-aware icon. 🫶
• --version — prints the version. gotta know what you're working with. 💜

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

the legends themselves: John MacFarlane, Vicent Marti, Kārlis Gaņģis, Nick Wellnhofer. 👑👑👑👑

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

the CommonMark spec: https://spec.commonmark.org — go read it, iykyk, it's the source of truth and it ate. 📚✨

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one lives in the LOCAL section, dated February 11, 2020, and it's the cmark(1) manual — so if you ever forget how to convert your markdown, you know exactly where to look. mwah. 💖🎀🦋🌸