History

Doodl was inspired by the glasseye package written by Simon Raper at CoppeliaMLA. Like glasseye, doodl brings together three things:

1. The markdown markup language (and, in particular, the pandoc extensions to markdown)
2. The Tufte wide margin layout¹1. The Tufte layout makes extensive use of a wide margin to display notes, images and charts.
3. Data visualization using d3

The original version was groundbreaking when it was written in 2015, but it was essentially a personal project that Raper kindly made available to others as a courtesy. It was not intended to be a generally usable tool. Our version differs from the original in the following ways:

1. We have upgraded the version of Python from the original 2.7 to 3.12.
2. We have upgraded the version of d3 from version 6 to version 7.9.0 (the latest stable version).
3. As a result of upgrading d3, all of the chart implementations have been almost completely rewritten.
4. We have changed the build implementation to use make, and have removed any dependencies or references to hard coded personal folder names.
5. We have added a number of new chart types that were not in the original version.
6. The generated Javascript bundles are now referenced from CDNs instead of locally.
7. We have added the ability to add many, many other sources of visualizations using Laurent P. René de Cotret's Pandoc-Plot package
8. The package now consists of a python script (what you get when you type "doodl" on the command line), and three remotely hosted files (two CSS and one Javascript).
9. We have also made it possible to use custom charts, implemented outside of doodl.

The result is that making and formatting a new document is now just a matter of installing doodl, creating a new markdown document, and running doodl on the document, which creates an equivalent HTML document (possibly including image files in a plots folder, generated by Pandoc-Plot).