Dashing is a general purpose tool for starting with some HTML documentation and generating Dash documentation.

Dashing uses CSS3 selectors to tag an HTML document for import into Dash. It generates a complete docset for you.

This supports the following Dash features:

• Index pages
• Custom icon
• Table of Contents auto-generation

See: https://kapeli.com/docsets

Prebuilt OSX 64-bit binaries are available here: https://github.com/technosophos/dashing/releases

If you have Go 1.4 or later installed, simply run:

go get -u github.com/technosophos/dashing

Dashing will now be located at $GOPATH/bin/dashing.

A prebuilt binary is also available as a GitHub release.

To get started, cd to the directory that you want to generate documentation inside.

$ cd mydocs
$ dashing create
# Now you can edit dashing.json. See below.
$ dashing build mydocs

You will now have a directory called mydocs.docset that contains all the documentation you need for Dash.

For more, run dashing help.

The basic Dashing format looks like this:

{
    "name": "Dashing",
    "index":"index.html",
    "icon32x32": "icon.png",
    "externalURL": "https://github.com/technosophos/dashing",
    "selectors": {
        "dt a": "Command",
        "title": "Package"
    },
    "ignore": [
        "ABOUT"
    ]
}

• name: Name of the package
• index: Default index file in the existing docs
• icon32x32: a 32x32 pixel PNG icon
• externalURL: the base URL of the docs
• selectors: a map of selectors. There is a simple format and a more advanced format (see below for details).
• ignore: a list of matches to be ignored (see below)

Dashing uses CSS 3 selectors to map patterns in a document to Dash sections. You tell Dashing which patterns in HTML map to which Dash data type. The list of Dash data types can be found here: https://kapeli.com/docsets.

{
  "selectors": {
    "h1 a": "Package",
    "h2.classdef a": "Class",
  }
}

The above will look for h1 a combinations, and treat those as package definitions, and h2 class="classdef" a combinations and treat those as Class definitions.

On occasion, you'll have to manually ignore some matched text bits. To do that, you can use the ignores directive in the JSON file:

{
  "selectors": {
    "h1 a": "Package",
    "h2.classdef a": "Class",
  },
  "ignore": ["DESCRIPTION", "MORE"]
}

The above will ignore anything whose text matches the exact text "DESCRIPTION" or "MORE", even if the selectors match.

Instead of using a simple mapping of selector to type, you have the option of mapping a selector to a substitution pattern.

The format for this type of selectors map looks like this:

{
    "name": "BusyBox",
    "package":"busybox",
    "index":"BusyBox.html",
    "icon32x32":"busybox1.png",
    "selectors": {
        "dt a": "Command",
        "title": {
          "type":"Package",
          "regexp": " - The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux",
          "replacement": ""
        }
    },
    "ignore": [
        "ABOUT"
    ]
}

The format of the selector value is:

"css selector": {
      "type":"Dash data type",
      "regexp": "PCRE regular expression (no need to enclose in //)",
      "replacement": "Replacement text"
}

Full documentation on the regular expression format can be found here: http://golang.org/pkg/regexp/syntax/

Documentation on the format for replacement can be found here: http://golang.org/pkg/regexp/#Regexp.ReplaceAllString