MkDocs Material Extensions

Markdown extension resources for MkDocs for Material

Install

pip install mkdocs-material-extensions

Inline SVG Icons

MkDocs Material provides numerous icons from Material, FontAwesome, and Octicons, but it does so by inlining the SVG icons into the source. Currently there is no easy way access these icons and arbitrarily insert them into Markdown content. Users must include the icon fonts themselves and do it with HTML.

This module allows you to use PyMdown Extensions' Emoji extension to enable easy insertion of MkDocs Material's SVG assets using simple :emoji-syntax:. This is done by creating our own emoji index and emoji generator. The custom index provides a modified version of the Emoji extensions Twemoji index.

In addition to the custom index, you must also specify the associated custom generator. This will will find the appropriate icon and insert it into your Markdown content as an inlined SVG.

Example:

markdown_extensions:
  - pymdownx.emoji:
      emoji_index: !!python/name:materialx.emoji.twemoji
      emoji_generator: !!python/name:materialx.emoji.to_svg

Then, using the folder structure of Material's .icons folder, you can specify icons:

We can use Material Icons :material-airplane:.

We can also use Fontawesome Icons :fontawesome-solid-ambulance:.

That's not all, we can also use Octicons :octicons-octoface:.

Using Local Custom Icons

In MkDocs, you can override theme assets locally, and even add assets to the theme. Unfortunately, the Markdown parsing process isn't aware of the MkDocs environment. Luckily, if you are using PyMdown Extensions 7.1, you can pass in custom icon paths that will be used when constructing the emoji index and include your custom SVG assets. If a folder path of theme/my_icons was given to the index builder, all icons under my_project/my_icons, even in sub-folders, would become part of the index.

markdown_extensions:
  - pymdownx.emoji:
      emoji_index: !!python/name:materialx.emoji.twemoji
      emoji_generator: !!python/name:materialx.emoji.to_svg
      custom_icons:
        - theme/my_icons

If given an icon at my_project/my_icons/animals/bird.svg, the icon would be available using the emoji syntax as :animals-bird:. Notice that the base folder that is provided doesn't contribute to the icon's name. Also, folders are separated with -. Folder names and icon names should be compatible with the emoji syntax, so special characters should be avoided -- - and _ are okay.

You can provide as many paths as you would like, and they will be evaluated in the order that they are specified. The Material theme's own icons will be evaluated after all custom paths. This allows a user to override Material's icons if desired.

If an icon name is already in the index, the icon will not be added. It is recommended to always have your icons in sub-folders to help namespace them to avoid name collisions. In the example above, bird was under animals which created the name :animals-bird: and helped create a more unique name with less of a chance of creating a duplicate name with existing emoji and Material icons.