sticks is a tiny and customizable static site generator. it leverages pandoc to great extent, and so consists only of a single bash script.

don't use this! use hakyll instead. it's a library for constructing static site generators: hooking directly into pandoc's haskell library and providing much more reasonable constructs for accomplishing such a task. i just wanted an excuse to learn pandoc proper.

• html templating: directly through pandoc.
• support for markdown, restructured text, asciidoc, org-mode...
• renders latex and typst directly to pdfs
• pandoc flavoured markdown, including:
  • lists with preserved order (numbers mean something)
  • line blocks and nested quotes
  • code blocks and syntax highlighting
  • a wide variety of tables
  • inline latex via katex+mathml
  • yaml metadata blocks (!!!)

pandoc (and by extension sticks) operates on templates containing variables and expressions, and files containing metadata and content.

templates are simply an html, or pdf, or etc file containing the content needed (ex. header and footer material) for a free-standing document. they contain the special $body$ variable somewhere for file injection. files may be prefixed with a YAML metadata block declaring variables (ex. title, subtitle, author...) for use by templates, and a special template: variable to denote the template to be used.

every project must have a _templates folder (configurable location, see --templates) containing a default.html. this is the template that will be used by files lacking an explicit template. templates are for the output type, which in sticks' case is HTML and PDF.

the aforementioned YAML metadata blocks may be placed before files of any type. they look like the following:

---
template: default
title: a really cool document
subtitle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
---