Anchorify is a simple script written in Ruby that parses an HTML document to produce anchored headings and an optional table of contents.

The script parses the input HTML document and searches for <hn> tags ("n" being a number from 1 to 6). It replaces these tags with an "anchored" version, like so:

  <h1>Hello, everybody!<h1> # This gets changed to the following line
  <h1 id="hello,-everybody!">Hello, everybody!</h1>

And the table of contents that goes with that would look like this:

  <a href="#hello,-everybody!">Hello, everybody!</a>

For each new header level (<h1>, <h2> etc.), a new indented level is used in the table of contents. For example:

  <h1>Foo</h1>
  <h2>Bar</h2>
  <h2>Baz</h2>
  <h3>Chunky Bacon</h3>

Would generate a table of contents that looks like this:

  Foo
      Bar
      Baz
          Chunky Bacon

First of all, you need to make sure that you have Ruby and git installed on your machine. To do this in Ubuntu, execute the following command:

  sudo apt-get install ruby git

Then, nagivate to a directory you want to download the script to and clone the git repo and make the script executable:

  git clone git://github.com/samwho/anchorify.git
  cd anchorify
  chmod +x anchorify

Using the script is easy. The only prerequisite is having ruby installed on your system, then you just execute:

  anchorify example.html

Where example.html is an HTML document. The output is printed to the screen so if you want to save to another file you would do the following:

  anchorify example.html >> anchorified.html

Adding a table of contents to your document is easy, simply put the pseudo tag <toc> somewhere in your HTML document and the script will replace that with the table of contents in the resulting HTML.