Build Modules

Build modules are high-level bundles of settings, with various built-in ones available via lamarkdown.m.<modulename>(); e.g.:

import lamarkdown as la
la.m.plots()  # Invoke the m.plots build module

Here are the standard build modules:

Build Module Description
m.doc() Styles output as a professional-looking document, and invokes various extensions. Acts as the set of defaults when no build files exist.
m.plots() Adds support for several text-based graphics tools.
m.code() Adds styling for syntax-highlighted code, as produced by Pygments.
m.page_numbers() Adds pseudo-page numbers to the output document.
m.teaching() Adds styling relevant to an educational environment, for tests or other assessments.

You can create your own build module as a standard Python module. Within the module, place all Lamarkdown API calls inside a function, and invoke a function from your build file:

# my_build_mod.py (custom build module)
from lamarkdown import la
def apply():
    la.css('p { background: black; color: white; }')

# md_build.py (build file)
import my_build_mod
my_build_mod.apply()  # Invoke your custom build module

Design Notes

The function can be called anything. It is required, though, because putting Lamarkdown API calls into the top-level scope of your custom build module won’t work reliably, especially in live update (-l/--live) mode. Code in this scope only runs once, when the module is first loaded, whereas we want it to run whenever the document is recompiled.

By contrast, build files (e.g., md_build.py) do have code in their top-level scope, because they are loaded/re-loaded via a customised mechanism, not a standard import statement.