From: Thomas Leitner <t_leitner@...>
Date: 2010-01-23T01:49:47+09:00
Subject: [ANN] kramdown 0.4.0 released

## About kramdown

kramdown (sic, not Kramdown or KramDown, just 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].
Homepage for installation instructions and documentation:
    http://kramdown.rubyforge.org


## kramdown 0.4.0 released

This release features the addition of a [simple table syntax][1] and
[syntax highlighting][2] of code blocks. I think that with these two
additions kramdown now supports all the major features regarding
parsing and HTML output that Maruku supports.

Regarding speed: Simple benchmarks using the Markdown README file (can
be found inside [this zip file][3]) show that kramdown is currently
faster than, for example, the original Markdown.pl, PHP Markdown, PHP
Markdown Extra, Python Markdown and Maruku.


## Changes

* Major changes:

  - Added [syntax][1] for simple tables
  - Added optional [syntax highlighting][2] of code blocks through the
    CodeRay library

* Minor changes:

  - Changed CSS class name `kramdown-footnotes` to `footnotes` for
    better compatibility

* Bug fixes:

  - Regular expression for matching escaped characters now works
    correctly

[1]: http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html#tables
[2]: http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html#syntax-highlighting
[3]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/downloads/Markdown_1.0.1.zip