Skip Front Matter

Front matter for static site generators

Many static site generators (i.e., Jekyll, Middleman) rely on front matter added to the top of the document to determine how to convert the content. Front matter typically starts on the first line of a file and is bounded by block delimiters (e.g., ---).

Here’s an example of a document that contains front matter:

---  (1)
layout: default (2)
---  (3)
= Document Title

content

1	Front matter opening delimiter
2	Front matter data
3	Front matter closing delimiter

The static site generator removes these lines before passing the document to the AsciiDoc processor to be converted. Outside of the tool, however, these extra lines can throw off the processor.

skip-front-matter attribute

If the skip-front-matter attribute is set via the API or CLI (e.g., -a skip-front-matter), Asciidoctor will recognize the front matter and consume it before parsing the document. Asciidoctor stores the content it extracts in the front-matter attribute to make it available for integrations. Asciidoctor also removes front matter when reading include files.