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Merlon Docs

Preprocessor / templating (out of scope)

Merlon Docs does not run preprocessor or templating steps on shard source — no variable substitution, conditional blocks, parameterized partial includes, or other macro-style transforms before or after compile.

Those concerns belong in a separate tool or pipeline stage in the consumer repo:

preprocess (optional) → merlon compile / check → postprocess (optional)

Run preprocessing before shards are authored or committed (or regenerate shards from templates in CI). Run postprocessing after Merlon Docs produces compiled output when you need transforms on the assembled artifact.

Out of scope examples:

  • {{variable}} / {{ env.VAR }} substitution in shard bodies
  • Template engines (Handlebars, Nunjucks, Jinja-style {% if %} blocks)
  • Parameterized partial includes beyond Merlon Docs’ captioned insert inlining (inlineInserts)
  • Build-time code generation that mutates shard markdown prior to merlon compile

Not compile hooks: guides[].compile.hooks assemble authored GFM — link rewrites, insert inlining, and similar — not a template engine.

Non-goals: no built-in variable engine, template parser, or preprocessor hook API in Merlon Docs core.

Part of Design constraints.