[ANN] kramdown - a fast new Ruby Markdown-superset parser

[Thomas Leitner]

Hi everybody,

wanted to let you know that I have just released version 0.2.0 of
kramdown.

kramdown is a *free* GPL-licensed [Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org)
library for parsing 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.

It is probably the fastest pure-Ruby Markdown converter available
(December 2009), being 5x faster than Maruku and about 10x faster
than BlueFeather (although still 30x slower than native code like
BlueCloth 2 or rdiscount). It also seems to be on par with PHP
Markdown but way faster than PHP Markdown Extra and Markdown.pl (but
this has not been tested extensively).

Since the conversion of a kramdown document is done in two steps,
first building an intermediate tree representation of the
document while parsing and then rendering the tree as HTML fragment, it
should also be easy to add additional converters for outputting, for
example, a PDF file via LaTeX.

I have also written a detailed syntax description for the kramdown
syntax (the superset of Markdown which kramdown parses) which is
available at <http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html> and a [quick
reference sheet](http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/quickref.html) for quick
lookup purposes.
Homepage for installation instructions and documentation:
    http://kramdown.rubyforge.org

Best regards,
  Thomas