Maruku

Maruku is a Markdown-superset interpreter.

Maruku implements:

• The original Markdown syntax.
• All the improvements in PHP Markdown Extra.
• A new meta-data syntax.

More documentation about Maruku can be found on the project's website: http://maruku.rubyforge.org

Basic Use

The basic use is to create a new document, and then write its HTML representation with the method to_html:

doc = Maruku.new(markdown_string)
puts doc.to_html

The #to_html method returns a string, representing an HTML fragment.

Maruku.new("## Header ##").to_html
# => "<h2 id='header'>header</h2>"

This is useful for using Maruku inside other programs.

If you want to create full HTML documents, use the #to_html_document method.

Error Management

Maruku has a real parser, so it warns you if something is wrong with the input. The default behaviour is to print a warning on standard error, and then try to continue.

This behavior can be customized with the :on_error option. For example:

Maruku.new(string, :on_error => :raise)

This tells Maruku to raise an exception if it encounters a parsing error.

To change the error stream, use the :error_stream option:

errors = "Errors reported by Maruku:\n"
Maruku.new(invalid, :error_stream => errors)

You can pass in any object that supports the << method.

Command-line usage

Maruku comes with two command-line programs: maruku and marutex.

maruku converts Markdown to HTML:

$ maruku file.md  # creates file.html

marutex converts Markdown to LaTeX, then calls pdflatex to transform the LaTeX to a PDF:

$ marutex file.md  # creates file.tex and file.pdf

Code organization

The public interface is the Maruku class. Everything else is in the module MaRuKu.