# kramdown

## Readme first!

kramdown was originally licensed under the GPL until the 1.0.0 release. However, due to the many
requests it is now released under the MIT license and therefore can easily be used in commercial
projects, too.

However, if you use kramdown in a commerical setting, please consider **contributing back any
changes** for the benefit of the community and/or **making a donation** (see the links in the
sidebar on the [kramdown homepage](http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/)!


## Introduction

kramdown is yet-another-markdown-parser but fast, pure Ruby, using a strict syntax definition and
supporting several common extensions.

The syntax definition for the kramdown syntax can be found in **doc/syntax.page** (or online at
<http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html>) and a quick reference is available in
**doc/quickref.page** or online at <http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/quickref.html>.

The kramdown library is mainly written to support the kramdown-to-HTML conversion chain. However,
due to its flexibility it supports other input and output formats as well. Here is a list of the
supported formats:

* input formats: kramdown (a Markdown superset), Markdown, HTML
* output formats: HTML, kramdown, LaTeX (and therefore PDF)

All the documentation on the available input and output formats is available in the **doc/**
directory and online at <http://kramdown.rubyforge.org>.


## Usage

kramdown has a basic *Cloth API, so using kramdown is as easy as

```ruby
require 'kramdown'

Kramdown::Document.new(text).to_html
```

For detailed information have a look at the API documentation of the `Kramdown::Document` class.

The full API documentation is available at <http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/rdoc/>, other sites with an
API documentation for kramdown probably don't provide the complete documentation!

There are also some third-party libraries that extend the functionality of kramdown -- see the
kramdown Wiki at <https://github.com/gettalong/kramdown/wiki>.


## Development

Just clone the git repository as described in **doc/installation.page** and you are good to go. You
probably want to install `rake` so that you can use the provided rake tasks. Aside from that:

* The `tidy` binary needs to be installed for the automatically derived tests to work.
* The `latex` binary needs to be installed for the latex-compilation tests to work.


## License

MIT - see the **COPYING** file.