Zensical strips YAML front matter before Markdown extensions (front matter variables not available)

[barcar]

Problem

When building this project’s docs with Zensical, YAML front matter is stripped from Markdown files before Python-Markdown extensions run. As a result, markdown_macros cannot see page front matter and cannot expose front-matter keys as Jinja2 template variables during a Zensical build.

This breaks the expectation/compatibility story for front-matter-as-variables in Zensical and means the live demo cannot actually validate front matter rendering (it can only validate config/module/include_yaml variables).

Evidence

• Zensical docs: front matter is “stripped from the file contents before the rest of the content is handed over to the Markdown parser”.
  • https://zensical.org/docs/authoring/frontmatter/
• In the built docs output (site/demo/index.html), the demo’s rendered section shows fm_author/fm_features empty even though the source code block contains them.

Expected

Either:

• Zensical provides a way to disable front matter stripping, or
• Zensical provides a mechanism to pass parsed page.meta (front matter) into Python-Markdown extensions (e.g. as per-page extension variables), or
• The docs/demo and project docs clearly document this as a Zensical limitation and suggest alternatives.

Proposed next steps

• Update docs/demo.md to explicitly call out the limitation and demonstrate front matter rendering via a plain-Python example (where the extension does receive front matter).
• Optionally open an upstream issue/feat

[barcar]

This has been mitigated with a monkey patch for Zensical.

Permanent fix will be via Zensical PR zensical/zensical#458 or similar.