[ANN] discount <markdown in C>

david parsons orc at pell.portland.or.us
Sat Mar 1 14:04:57 EST 2008


I've written an implementation of Markdown in C, for people like me
who shout BAH! and wave their canes at modern programming languages.
(I needed a decent markup language for my website and weblog, and
didn't want to have to install any new programming languages on the
machine.)

Discount <http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount> has been in
production for the past two and a half months, and is moving slowly
enough so that it actually counts as stable. It includes a standalone
markdown interpreter, a library, and a couple of sample programs that
I use for generating webpages.

There are some whoppingly nonstandard extensions:

1. you can configure the interpreter with 8-character tabstops.
2. definition lists, using
=item=
text
=item=
text
3. a small stack of smartypantish character substitutions
4. pseudo-protocol extensions
- [foo](class:bar) -- wrap foo in <span class=bar>
- [foo](id:bar) -- wrap foo in <a id="bar">
- [foo](raw:bar) -- emit bar without any processing
5. size extensions for images, via
![alt](image =WWWxHHH "title")
6. pandoc-style header blocks
7. <style> block elements, which are squirreled away by the
library and can be retrieved by web-page generators.


Despite all this, discount still passes MarkdownTest_1.0 when
I turn extensions off and turn --tidy on.



-david parsons


More information about the Markdown-Discuss mailing list