---
title: Home
in_menu: true
sort_info: 1
---
## Overview

If you want to get started with kramdown, have a look at the [installation page](installation.html)
to see how you can install it on your system. Then look through the
[documentation](documentation.html) for finding information about how to actually use kramdown and
its parsers/converters. The [quick reference](quickref.html) provides a overview of the syntax -- if
you need a more detailed description of the superset of Markdown which kramdown supports the [syntax
page](syntax.html) is the place to go!

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## Bugs, Forums, Mailing Lists

If you have found a bug, you should [report it here][bug_report]. Also, there is the [kramdown-users
google group][ml] available if you have any questions!

[bug_report]: http://github.com/gettalong/kramdown/issues
[ml]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/kramdown-users


## Thanks

kramdown would not be possible without the prior work of many other people. I want to thank everyone
involved with making Markdown such a nice markup language and especially the developers of other
Markdown implementations because kramdown borrowed many ideas from existing packages.


## Author

* Thomas Leitner
* e-Mail: <mailto:t_leitner@gmx.at>

[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
[Maruku]: http://maruku.rubyforge.org
[BlueFeather]: http://ruby.morphball.net/bluefeather/index_en.html

--- intro
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<meta itemprop="applicationCategory" content="Markdown library, Markdown converter" />
<meta itemprop="operatingSystem" content="Linux, Windows, Mac OS X" />
<div itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<meta itemprop="name" content="Thomas Leitner" />
<meta itemprop="email" content="t_leitner@gmx.at" />
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**kramdown**{:itemprop="name"} (sic, not Kramdown or KramDown, just kramdown) is a *free*
[MIT](https://github.com/gettalong/kramdown/blob/master/COPYING){:itemprop="license"}-licensed
[Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org) library for parsing and converting a superset of Markdown. It is
completely written in Ruby, supports standard Markdown (with some minor modifications) and various
extensions that have been made popular by the [PHP Markdown Extra] package and [Maruku].
{:itemprop="description"}

It is probably the fastest pure-Ruby Markdown converter available (September 2014), being about 3x
faster than [Maruku] and about 4.5x faster than [BlueFeather].

Version **1.8.0**{:itemprop="softwareVersion"} released on
**2015-07-04**{:itemprop="datePublished"}, [more news](news.html)
{: style="text-align: center; font-size: 80%"}

</div>


[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
[Maruku]: http://maruku.rubyforge.org
[BlueFeather]: http://ruby.morphball.net/bluefeather/index_en.html