As you may recall, a few months ago I played with ways to craft printable, vim-edited cheatsheets. This week I had some time to revisit the endeavour and refine the process.

First thing I did was to revert to using Markdown rather than the vimwiki markup. Why? Well, for one Markdown is familiar territory, and there is already Perl modules that grok it and thus can be used manipulate those cheatsheets. And as a bonus, if I don’t go too much outside of the vanilla Markdown, the raw files already look kinda nice on GitHub.

Talking of GitHub, second thing I did was to create a new repository just for my cheatsheets. Say hello to yanick/cheatsheet and my prototype cheatsheet for Fugitive.

Third thing I did was to tweak and modify the script I was using to convert the raw Markdown cheatsheets into purtier stuff. It’s now mkd_cheatsheets.pl, and that sucker can output the cheatsheet in three different formats.

First format, just basic html:

$ ./bin/mkd_cheatsheets.pl vim/fugitive.mkd

Second format, pretty pdf, generated via the might of prince:

$ ./bin/mkd_cheatsheets.pl —pdf vim/fugitive.mkd

Third format, bookletified pdf, which uses pdftk and pdfnup to reorder pages and gather them two-per-sheet so that I can fold my cheatsheets in a format pretty close to the O’Reilly’s reference books.

$ ./bin/mkd_cheatsheets.pl —booklet vim/fugitive.mkd

All in all, it’s nothing earth-shattering but I have the feeling I’m slowly finding the sweet spot for a system where it’s easy to jolt down notes, and yet can be easily cleaned up into useful (shareable) booklets.