About MlxShake
Development History
MlxShake was started in September 2021 as a fork of MathWorker Michio Inoue’s livescript2markdown project. I created this fork because I wanted to enhance the functionality of livescript2markdown and fix a couple bugs, and it was easier to create a fork than to send a bunch of PRs up to livescript2markdown. Also I wanted the code to be just how I like it, and having my own project let me do it this way.
Features and Enhancements
Viewed as a fork of livescript2markdown, MlxShake provides the following features:
- Automation of entire export process from
.mlxto Markdown or other output. - Support for additional export targets.
- Captures rendered math equations as static local files.
- Better library packaging.
- Nicer formatting of generated Markdown.
- Captures and saves rendered math equations so you can produce a fully-local copy of the documentation.
- Fixes some bugs.
The main motivation here is to take the basic livescript2markdown code and “productize” it into a high quality library that can be easily reused by other Matlab code and in enterprise software contexts, but still be easy to use for simple applications.
Related Works and Acknowledgments
The core LaTeX-to-Markdown export code in MlxShake is based on MathWorker Michio Inoue’s livescript2markdown project.
The earlier part of the export process that converts .mlx files to .tex is informed by, but does not actually use any code from, Pavel Roslovets’ Live-Script-To-Markdown-Converter.
I was introduced to livescript2markdown and the potential for Matlab Live Scripts to act as rich documentation in a project by Vijay Iyer at MathWorks, and used this in a MathWorks-sponsored project to enhance the Neuropixel Utils library in 2021.
The repo structure and utility code comes from my own MatlabProjectTemplate project. Using it for MlxShake has helped me make MatlabProjectTemplate itself better.
Thank you to the Matlab Continuous Integration team for making Matlab CI a thing and supporting its free use for Open Source projects.