Gutenberg: My First Extension ever for printing markdown books in VSCode

Is fair to say that many people like markdown for documentation, and technical writing, github, and even right now I am writing markdown for this post, [insert recursion joke here]. For me it clears the mind, and lets you focus on writing, and not focus on formatting like some other programs such as Word do.

I had written a markdown-book script for a book I am writing, and is awesome, but I wanted to take it one step further.

I must say I started working on this, just to see what it takes to make an extension, there might be something like it already but most of the extensions I came across were for single files. Nevertheless it was an awesome experience to extend vscode functionality, and learn the whole process of making an extension in JS which is out of my comfort zone.

Marketplace Gutenberg can print a book and single files, much like the Gutenberg printing press could back in the good 'ole days. It can be configured to take more arguments if you are an experienced pandoc/latex user, and it can output just about anything that pandoc supports. I mainly tested with markdown(md) input, and pdf/docx/html output.

Full Repo Gutenberg

Let me know what you think, and try it out if you can, feedback is welcomed. If you use a Mac and have pandoc and latex or miktex installed please let me know how it went as I don't have a mac to test it on.

PS: Btw I had never written an extension for anything before, but I must say that vscode api documentation is great.

Resources:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/api/get-started/your-first-extension
• https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/vscode-api
• https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/publishing-extension