pandoc 0.4 released

[John MacFarlane]

I've just released a new version of pandoc (0.4), a program for
converting between different markup and markdown formats.

Using pandoc, you can convert markdown-formatted plain text to HTML,
LaTeX, ConTeXt, DocBook XML, groff man pages, S5 HTML slide shows, RTF,
reStructuredText, and (using the associated shell script markdown2pdf)
PDF. You can also convert HTML, LaTeX, and reStructuredText to markdown.
You can even convert markdown to markdown (prettyprinting).

Pandoc supports a number of extensions to standard markdown syntax (all
of which can be disabled by using the --strict option):

  - Document metadata (title, author, date)
  - Footnotes
  - Tables
  - Definition lists
  - Superscripts and subscripts
  - Strikeout
  - Inline LaTeX math and LaTeX commands
  - Markdown inside HTML blocks
  - Enhanced ordered lists: start number and numbering style are
    significant

Documentation, demonstrations, and a debian package can be found on
pandoc's website: http://sophos.berkeley.edu/macfarlane/pandoc/

The source tarball and binary packages for Windows and MacOS X can be
downloaded from Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/pandoc/

A small note in connection with the recent thread on
incremental parsing: Pandoc is written in Haskell, using the Parsec
library of parser combinators. It parses markdown incrementally, rather
than using regex substitutions. On large input files, it seems to be
significantly faster than Markdown.pl: 'pandoc --strict' converts the
TextMate manual almost four times faster than Markdown.pl 1.0.2b8
(http://code.google.com/p/pandoc/wiki/Benchmarks). (Of course, there
are huge advantages to using a small, portable perl script.)

John