# 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 commercial setting, please consider contributing back any changes for the benefit of the community and/or {becoming a sponsor} or {a patron} - thanks!

Sponsors:

- GROSSWEBER provides <a href=“grossweber.com/b/kramdown” target=“_blank”>software development consulting and training services</a>.

## Introduction¶ ↑

kramdown is a fast, pure Ruby Markdown superset converter, 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 kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html) and a quick reference is available in doc/quickref.page or online at kramdown.gettalong.org/quickref.html.

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

- input formats: kramdown (a Markdown superset), Markdown, GFM, HTML

- output formats: HTML, kramdown, LaTeX (and therefore PDF), PDF via Prawn

All the documentation on the available input and output formats is available in the doc/ directory and online at kramdown.gettalong.org.

Starting from version 1.0.0 kramdown is using a versioning scheme with major, minor and patch parts in the version number where the major number changes on backwards-incompatible changes, the minor number on the introduction of new features and the patch number on everything else.

For information about changes between versions, have a look at kramdown.gettalong.org/news.html or the commit history!

## Usage¶ ↑

kramdown has a very simple API, so using kramdown is as easy as

    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 kramdown.gettalong.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 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.

If you want to run the tests, the development dependencies are needed as well as some additional programs like `tidy` and `latex`. See the `.travis.yml` file for more information.

## License¶ ↑

MIT - see the COPYING file.