[ANN] lunamark 0.2

[John MacFarlane]

I'm pleased to announce the release of lunamark 0.2. This is a complete
rewrite of the 2009 version, with a new API. I am very grateful to Hans Hagen,
who resurrected the project for use in ConTeXt and made major improvements in
the efficiency and performance of the code.

Lunamark is a lua library and command-line program for conversion of markdown
to other textual formats. Currently HTML, dzslides (HTML5 slides), Docbook,
ConTeXt, LaTeX, and Groff man are the supported output formats, but it is easy
to add new writers or modify existing ones. The markdown parser is written
using a PEG grammar and can also be modified by the user.

The library is as portable as lua and has very good performance. It is
slightly faster than the author's own C library peg-markdown, an order of
magnitude faster than pandoc, two orders of magnitude faster than Markdown.pl,
and three orders of magnitude faster than markdown.lua.

A number of extensions are supported, including notes, definition lists,
smart typography, pandoc title blocks, and a very flexible metadata format.
These can be turned on and off individually. Lunamark is designed with
hackability in mind; I see it as a good testbed for exploring markdown syntax
ideas. It includes an extensive test suite.

For more information, see lunamark's website: http://jgm.github.com/lunamark.

John