# Welcome!

This is the home of Pygments. It is a generic syntax highlighter suitable for use in code hosting, forums, wikis or other applications that need to prettify source code. Highlights are:

- a wide range of over 300 languages and other text formats is supported
- special attention is paid to details that increase highlighting quality
- support for new languages and formats are added easily; most languages use a simple regex-based lexing mechanism
- a number of output formats is available, among them HTML, RTF, LaTeX and ANSI sequences
- it is usable as a command-line tool and as a library
- … and it highlights even Perl 6!

Read more in the FAQ list or the documentation, or download the latest release.

## Contribute

Like every open-source project, we are always looking for volunteers to help us with programming. Python knowledge is required, but don’t fear: Python is a very clear and easy to learn language.

Development takes place on Bitbucket, where the Mercurial repository, tickets and pull requests can be viewed.

Our primary communication instrument is the IRC channel #pocoo on the Freenode network. To join it, let your IRC client connect to `irc.freenode.net` and do `/join #pocoo`.

If you found a bug, just open a ticket in the Bitbucket tracker. Be sure to log in to be notified when the issue is fixed – development is not fast-paced as the library is quite stable. You can also send an e-mail to the developers, see below.

## The authors

Pygments is maintained by Georg Brandl, e-mail address georg@python.org.

Many lexers and fixes have been contributed by Armin Ronacher, the rest of the Pocoo team and Tim Hatch.