gettalong/kramdown

kramdown is a fast, pure Ruby Markdown superset converter, using a strict syntax definition and supporting several common extensions.

Ruby

1,782

1,140 commits

updated Jan 31, 2026

See the code

README

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:

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 http://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html) and a quick reference is available in doc/quickref.page or online at http://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 http://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 http://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 http://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 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.

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.

html
kramdown
markdown
pdf
ruby

gettalong/kramdown

kramdown is a fast, pure Ruby Markdown superset converter, using a strict syntax definition and supporting several common extensions.

Ruby

1,782

1,140 commits

updated Jan 31, 2026

See the code

README

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:

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 http://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html) and a quick reference is available in doc/quickref.page or online at http://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 http://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 http://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 http://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 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.

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.

html
kramdown
markdown
pdf
ruby

Significant stargazers

Samuel Williams

1,420 followers · starred Apr 2020

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1,295 followers · starred Nov 2008

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142 followers · starred Apr 2013

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454 followers · starred Jan 2017