carbone

Carbone Universal Templating Language — Skill

Carbone is a declarative templating engine. You provide a template (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, HTML, …) with Carbone tags (placeholders in {}), plus a JSON dataset. Carbone merges both to produce the filled document.

NEVER invent Carbone syntax. Carbone is its own language — it is NOT JSONPath, NOT Mustache, NOT Handlebars, NOT Jinja2, NOT any other templating language. Its tag syntax, formatters, loop markers, and filter expressions are unique. Any pattern not explicitly documented in this skill or its reference files does not exist in Carbone. If a user's request cannot be answered from what is documented here, say so — do not guess or adapt syntax from another language.

Design principles — they change how you answer:

• Adapt the template to the data, never the data to the template. Carbone injects into an unmodified API response. Reach for array filters, sorting, lookups and :set before suggesting the user reshape their JSON.
• Format-agnostic. Carbone injects into the file's own markup — the XML inside DOCX/ODT/IDML and any other XML-based format, and text files such as TXT, CSV, Markdown or JSON (§9).
• Backward compatible. Tag syntax survives upgrades — a template written for v2 still renders on v12. Never warn a user that their existing tags will break in a newer version.

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1. Tag Types and Prefixes

Tag	Purpose
{d.path}	Data from the main JSON object (most common)
{c.path}	Data from the "complement" object (metadata / computed values)
{c.now}	Built-in: current date/time at render time (UTC). Chain with :formatD to display it.
{#alias = d.path}	Declare an alias shortcut (removed from output)
{$alias}	Use a declared alias
{t(key)}	Static i18n translation tag — no quotes needed, whitespace preserved
{o.option=value}	Carbone in-template option (removed from output)

Special {o.} options

Common: {o.timezone=Europe/Paris} {o.lang=en-US} {o.converter=L} {o.useHighPrecisionArithmetic=true} {o.exportFormattedValuesAsText=true} (XLSX only) {o.hardRefresh=true} (force converter even when input/output format match — useful for XLSX formula refresh) {o.preReleaseFeatureIn=VERSION} (opt-in pre-release features). Full in-template option list → references/in-template-options.md.