The plaintextaccounting.org website

This is the source for plaintextaccounting.org, an information portal/overview site for Plain Text Accounting and related tools: Ledger, hledger, beancount, etc.

New

In 2023-11, source files have been moved to the src/ folder and HTML files are now generated in the out/ folder. And, the github wiki content has been moved to the static site.

The src/ folder is intended to be somewhat compatible with Obsidian, for efficient/rich local editing and viewing; this is driving the current file names/"slugs", eg.

Old

Needs update:

Since 2022-01, there is also a companion wiki: https://wiki.plaintextaccounting.org. (The wiki is hosted on Github and its urls are not finalised, but https://wiki.plaintextaccounting.org[/PAGE] will always redirect to the right place.)

Contributing

Construction and rendering

The site is mainly one big markdown page, plus a few more. These are rendered by Pandoc (chosen originally for its power and dependability, to minimise layout troubleshooting time).

Hosting and deployment

The site's repo is https://github.com/plaintextaccounting/plaintextaccounting. Since 2022-01, the site is rendered by Cloudflare Pages. Changes merged in the master branch appear at plaintextaccounting.org within 2-3 minutes.

Where to discuss / give feedback

The site is managed via

• the Github issue tracker
• and the #plaintextaccounting:matrix.org room on Matrix, or the bridged #plaintextaccounting channel on Libera.chat. Site-related questions or discussion are welcome here.

How to make a change through the web

1. Log in to Github and click the pencil at index.md.
2. Make your changes to the markdown source.
3. Use the Preview tab to check the result.
4. When everything looks right, commit with a descriptive message.

This will be applied immediately if you have commit access, otherwise a fork and pull request will be created, which we will review soon.

How to make a change on your machine

1. Log in to Github, fork this repo, and clone the fork to your machine.
2. Make your changes to index.md (and/or README.md, css/*, images/*).
3. To preview, run make (requires GNU Make and pandoc 2.5+) and view index.html in your web browser.
4. When everything looks right, commit with a descriptive message.
5. git push to your fork.
6. Submit a pull request.

How to see a live preview on your machine

Quick and dirty ways:

• Use VS Code's preview pane (eg on mac: Cmd k Cmd v while editing index.md)
• Use Obsidian's preview mode (edit index.md, | to split the window, switch one into preview mode)

For accurate rendering:

• Install entr and livereloadx, run make html-watch for a live-reloading view at http://localhost:8100

How to get commit access

If you're a recurring contributor and haven't yet been granted commit access, please request it in the #plaintextaccounting chat.