ludic/tools/docgen
Orkuncakilkaya 2f3833a295 refactor(docs): rebuild the site around reading, not launching
The generated site had the shape of a product launch page: a near-black navy
ground with mint/coral radial glows, a gradient-clipped headline, a glowing
pill badge, nine emoji feature cards and scroll-reveal animations. None of it
told a reader anything about the language.

It is now typographic and light-first — a warm paper ground, a serif display
face, one ink-blue accent used only where it means something, and rules
instead of floating cards. Colour is reserved for code. Dark mode is the same
design with the ground inverted, defined once as tokens under a single
prefers-color-scheme block.

Structurally:

- base.css holds the tokens and shared chrome; site.css and docs.css hold what
  is specific to the landing page and the reference pages. They ship as linked
  files rather than being inlined into all 900+ pages, which takes the site
  from 16 MB to 5 MB and means a design change no longer needs a regenerate to
  be seen.
- api.css was dead — the generator never referenced it, rendering the API index
  with item.css — and is gone. docs.css replaces item.css and covers all four
  reference page kinds.
- Grids draw their separators as cell borders instead of bleeding a ruled
  background through gaps, so a final row with fewer cards than columns stops
  cleanly instead of leaving a grey hole. The feature card count is not a
  multiple of the column count at any breakpoint.
- Inline code loses its tinted chip; in a language reference, a box behind
  every keyword turns a paragraph into confetti.
- Fonts are the platform's own, so the site makes no webfont request.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-05 01:47:36 +03:00
..
assets refactor(docs): rebuild the site around reading, not launching 2026-09-05 01:47:36 +03:00
inventory.json feat(compiler): list literals, typed compound assignment, file:line diagnostics 2026-09-05 01:12:16 +03:00
README.md feat(tooling): port the docgen site generator to Ludic (no Python) (#41) 2026-08-31 02:12:32 +03:00

Ludic documentation generator

Generates the public documentation site (the pages branch) from a single source of truth, so the site can never drift from the language.

Source of truth

docs/
  language/<category>/<id>.md    one file per symbol — keyword, type, phase,
                                 builtin, namespace method, operator, annotation
  language/<category>/_section.md   section title + blurb + order
  language/colors/palette.json   the 221 named colors (generated by `x docs-palette`)
  site/site.json                 landing-page messaging (hero, features, …)
  site/snippets/*.ludic          the code shown on the landing page (real programs)
tools/docgen/inventory.json      the authoritative symbol set the coverage guard checks

A symbol file

---
id: screen-fill_rectangle     # anchor + page name (screen-fill_rectangle.html)
name: Screen.fill_rectangle
category: screen
kind: namespace-method        # keyword|type|phase|namespace-method|builtin|annotation|operator
tokens: Screen.fill_rectangle # literal token(s) the highlighter matches & links
sig: Screen.fill_rectangle(x, y, width, height, color)
tip: Draw a solid, filled rectangle.     # one sentence — the hover-card summary
order: 1
ns: Screen                    # namespace-method only
member: fill_rectangle        # namespace-method only
related: screen-clear screen-draw_rectangle
---

Rich description — inline `<code>`/`backticks`, "model instance" language.

Parameters:                   # for anything that takes arguments
- `x` — the left edge, in pixels
- `color` — the fill color, e.g. a `Color.*` name

​```ludic
program Example { … descriptive-named, compilable … }
​```

What it produces

One page per symbol (<id>.html), a namespace overview page per namespace (ns-screen.html … ns-color.html), a searchable index (api.html, fuzzy search over every symbol), the landing page (index.html), the ludic-highlight.js highlighter (all its symbol tables, tips, per-item link targets, per-parameter anchors and hover-card data generated from the sources above), symbols.json, and .nojekyll.

In any code sample: keywords/types/builtins/annotations link to their page; Screen.fill_rectangle links Screen → the namespace page and fill_rectangle → the method page separately; a named argument like width: links to that parameter's anchor; Color.Charcoal links Color and Charcoal separately; hovering any token shows a summary card from the real API data.

Build & check

The generator and its guards are written in Ludic and run through x — there is no Python in the pipeline. assets/ (the CSS/HTML/JS templates) and inventory.json are the only inputs the tools here still read directly.

bin/x docs-gen --out build/pages    # generate the whole site
bin/x docs-check build/pages        # coverage + duplicate-token + link guard
bin/x check-docs                    # parse every ```ludic doc fence

docs-check fails CI if any symbol in inventory.json lacks a page, if a token is documented on two pages, or if a highlighter link points at a missing page — so "every symbol is documented, autogenerated each time" is enforced. It needs a built bin/x (bootstrapped from the IR seed with clang alone).

Publish

.forgejo/workflows/docs.yml bootstraps the toolchain from the IR seed and runs x docs-gen + x docs-check on every push to main that touches docs/**, tools/docgen/** or tools/x/**, and publishes the result to the pages branch root. index.html + .nojekyll always stay at the root.

Colors

palette.json and selfhost/backend/stdlib/emit_color.ludic are both generated by bin/x docs-palette from a single palette table — the pal_add(...) rows in tools/x/docgen.ludic. Edit the table there and regenerate; do not hand-edit the generated files.