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.
Lunamark’s markdown parser currently supports the following extensions (which can be turned on or off individually):
It is very easy to extend the library by modifying the writers, adding new writers, and even modifying the markdown parser. Some simple examples are given in the API documentation.
Benchmarks (converting a 1M test file consisting of 25 copies of the markdown test suite concatenated together):
0.03s sundown
0.14s discount
-> 0.42s lunamark
0.50s peg-markdown
4.97s pandoc
56.75s Markdown.pl
996.14s markdown.lua
You can install the latest development version of lunamark using luarocks:
git clone http://github.com/jgm/lunamark.git
cd lunamark
luarocks make
Released versions will be uploaded to the luarocks repository, so you should be able to install them using:
luarocks install lunamark
There may be a short delay between the release and the luarocks upload.
Simple usage example:
local lunamark = require("lunamark")
local opts = { }
local writer = lunamark.writer.html.new(opts)
local parse = lunamark.reader.markdown.new(writer, opts)
print(parse("Here's my *text*"))
For more examples, see API documentation.
The lunamark executable allows easy markdown conversion from the command line. For usage instructions, see the lunamark(1) man page.
Lunamark comes with a simple lua library documentation tool, lunadoc. For usage instructions, see the lunadoc(1) man page. lunadoc reads source files and parses specially marked markdown comment blocks. Here is an example of the result.
The source directory contains a large test suite in tests. This includes existing Markdown and PHP Markdown tests, plus more tests for lunamark-specific features and additional corner cases.
To run the tests, use bin/shtest.
bin/shtest --help # get usage
bin/shtest # run all tests
bin/shtest indent # run all tests matching "indent"
bin/shtest -p Markdown.pl -n # run all tests using Markdown.pl, and normalizing whitespace & entities
Lunamark currently fails a few of the PHP Markdown tests. In most cases I disagree with the interpretation of markdown syntax that these tests reflect.
lunamark is released under the MIT license.
Most of the library is written by John MacFarlane. Hans Hagen made some major performance improvements. Khaled Hosny added the original ConTeXt writer.
The dzslides HTML, CSS, and javascript code is by Paul Rouget, released under the DWTFYWT Public License.