We kicked off with a quick introduction to custom syntaxes, before preparing our environment for developing code. We then covered some of the plugins available for parsing content, before exploring some of the reasons as to why we might need to parse custom syntaxes or styles directly before implementing two as examples of how to manipulate our code.

We then dived in and explored how most PostCSS plugins perform changes to our code. We then explored some of the techniques required to alter styles directly, before considering the effects of our changes on the code itself.

Next up, we examined how content can be formatted for screen or to a state ready for saving to disk (including the creation of source maps). We noted that whilst there are some specific methods available, these are reserved for custom syntax development, and that the options we used would suffice for initial manipulation of our code.

We then rounded out the chapter with a look at how we can add highlighting support to our projects—we examined the reasons for adding this, such as making code editing easier, and covered a quick demo that uses the Midas library to create properly laid out documentation for our projects.

The use of different syntaxes is a great way to remove the need for rewriting existing code into valid CSS. There is one thing, though: what happens if we have a mix of both standard CSS and pre-processor code, such as from less or Stylus? Can we work with both at the same time? Absolutely! We will take a look at the Pleeease library, which supports this, in the next chapter.