A couple days ago we released v0.1.0 of mdbook, a Rust tool for generating documents from markdown files on disk. Despite the low version number this is actually our 29th release, bringing with it a lot of new features and improvements. If you’ve ever read The Book or Rust By Example then you’ve actually experienced mdbook first hand!
Significant changes include:
- Improved accessibility
- An updated configuration format
- The ability to create your own backends and tooling for working with books
Special thanks goes to @JaimeValdemoros, a first time contributor to mdbook who responded to a mentoring opportunity posted on Reddit! He helped clean up a lot of the code internally by formalising the concept of preprocessors and paved the way for future improvements, doing an awesome job in the process 
Three alternate backends already exist:
- mdbook-linkcheck: a linkchecker for ensuring your book doesn’t contain any dead links
- mdbook-epub: an EPUB renderer
-
mdbook-test: A tool for running your entire document through rust-skeptic to ensure all code snippets compile and run. This is similar to
rustdoc, although it’s a lot more practical because you can import crates from crates.io simply by adding a line to yourbook.toml
Feel free to try out the new version of mdbook and let us know what you think.
