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Iterating with watch and preview

watch

Rebuilds on every save until you interrupt it:

journalkit watch --png          # SVG + PNG, the useful combination while editing
journalkit watch --pdf          # the real document, slower (Inkscape per page)

watching /…/my-journal for changes → svg + png
ctrl-c to stop

[18:17:35] initial build
  daily.yaml         ok      2 file(s)   0.4s
  weekly.yaml        ok      2 file(s)   0.3s

[18:17:41] daily.yaml
  daily.yaml         ok      2 file(s)   0.4s
      warning: daily: front: box: height 25.000mm is off the 2.500mm grid, snapped to 25.000mm

It watches the project's templates/, modules/ and icons/. Editing a template rebuilds that template; editing a module or an icon rebuilds every template, because either can change every page. Warnings appear indented under the file that caused them, and a broken template prints its error without stopping the watcher — fix the YAML and it rebuilds.

Pair it with an image viewer that reloads when a file changes, and keep it in a second terminal.

Pass a single document to watch just that one, or -o DIR to write somewhere other than out/.

preview

Renders a list of modules from standard input, without a template file. You feed it just the content: entries and it wraps them in a throwaway 105 × 170 mm document on a 2.5 mm grid:

cat <<'YAML' | journalkit preview
- {type: heading, text: PREVIEW, icon: sunrise}
- {type: fields, columns: [ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA]}
- {type: rating, label: SCALE, icon: mood, count: 5}
- {type: checklist, rows: 3}
- {type: lines, height: 20, border: true, label: RULED}
- {type: box, label: DOTS, height: fill, dots: true}
YAML

wrote /…/my-journal/out/preview/preview-01-preview.svg
wrote /…/my-journal/out/preview/preview-01-preview.png

The project's modules/ and icons/ are available, so this is a quick loop for developing a module: edit the .py, re-run the pipe, look. --project DIR points it at a different project; --modules FILE loads an extra module file from anywhere; --debug adds the grid overlay.

The debug overlay

--debug on build, watch or preview draws the module grid in blue and the content rectangle as a pink dashed box.