Apollon/userman.org

Preface

This document describes the use of apollon, specifically from the command line. This does not describe the API.

Installation

Currently there are two methods of installing apollon, however both are essentially the same thing.

For both methods you will need a rust installation with cargo. See the Official Guide for more information.

Through cargo

The easier method of installing apollon is to use cargo, rust's package manager.

cargo install apollon

That command will install apollon's latest release into cargo's installation directory. By default on UNIX-like systems, that path is "$HOME/.cargo/bin", make sure the installation path is included in the $PATH/%PATH% variable. This should be set by default when installing through rust up.

From source (git)

To install from source, First clone the source code:

git clone 'https://notabug.org/erislmm/Apollon.git' cd Apollon

then install with

cargo intstall --path .

On UNIX-like systems, or

cargo install /path .

On Windows.

this will also install apollon to cargo's default installation directory. On UNIX-like systems this is "$HOME/.cargo/bin", which is added to $PATH/%PATH% by default when installing via rustup.

Usage

The most basic use of the apollon command is

apollon [options] file

which will compile the input file() using the 'ANSI' generator (see Generators). To read the file to the terminal use

more file.out

You should see a formatted version of the text (see Formatting).

Options

For all the options listed, on UNIX-like systems prepend '-' and '--' for short and long options respecively, and prepend '/' for Windows.

Long	Short	Description
generator	g	Set the generator.
help	h	Display help message.
output	o	Sets the output file.
version	V	Prints version number.

Formatting

In Apollon, formatting is done through 'commands', currently there are only 11 basic commands. They are as such:

Long	Short	Description
title		Title of the document
author		Author of the document
date		Date written
	#	Comment (not included)
newline	nl	Forced newline
nheader	nhead	A numbered header
header	head	A unnumbered header
bold	bl	Bold text formatting
italic	il	Italic text formatting
bold-italic	bi	Bold and italic formatting

If no command is supplied then the text is not formatting in any special way.

Every command in Apollon is at the start of a line and followed by a colon (':'). For example:

bl: This is bold, and this is not

is valid, but something like:

hello, il: world!

isn't valid, nor is having multiple commands on the same line like:

bold: THIS il: is invalid

Newlines in apollon do not force a line break, to force a line break use an empty line. For example:

bold: bold text italic: and some italic on the same line!

But this is on a different line!

Generators

Currently there are 2 inbuilt generators in Apollon (with plans to expand). There is the ANSI (default) generator, and the HTML (generator).

Ansi generator

The ANSI Generator is the default generator, it outputs the text interspersed with ANSI control codes for the formatting. To read a file generated by the ANSI generator, open up your favourite terminal and use:

cat .out

or any other file reading utility, such as 'less' or 'more'.

HTML Generator

The use of a terminal emulator is important here, most terminals interpret ANSI control codes for text formatting. This is how the formatting works. The HTML Generator tries to generate correct HTML documents. Currently there isn't any support for custom style sheets, but it is in the works.

To view the generated HTML, open your favourite web browser and go to "file://.html".