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.

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.github.io . Changes to the master branch will appear at https://plaintextaccounting.org. Until 2022 this was done by Github Pages, hence the name plaintextaccounting.github.io making it the Github Pages site for the plaintextaccounting organization, allowing it to have the custom domain. Rendered HTML was generated locally and committed by editors.

Since 2022-01-14, the site is rendered by Cloudflare Pages, and HTML is no longer committed in the repo. Some cleanups may still be ongoing.

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 (warning, may not render the site accurately):

• 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)

An accurate way:

1. Install entr and livereloadx
2. In one window, make liverender to update index.html
3. In another window, make livereload to run a live-reloading local webserver
4. Open the page in a browser: http://localhost:10000
5. Save changes in index.md, see updates in the browser.

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.