---
title: Home
in_menu: true
sort_info: 1
---
## Overview

If you want to get started with kramdown, have a look at the [installation page](installation.html)
to see how you can install it on your system. Then look through the
[documentation](documentation.html) for finding information about how to actually use kramdown and
its parsers/converters. The [quick reference](quickref.html) provides a overview of the syntax -- if
you need a more detailed description of the superset of Markdown which kramdown supports the [syntax
page](syntax.html) is the place to go!

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## Bugs, Forums, Mailing Lists

If you have found a bug, you should [report it here][bug_report]. Also, there are [forums][forum]
and [mailing lists][ml] available if you have any questions!

[bug_report]: http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?atid=28673&group_id=7403&func=browse
[forum]: http://rubyforge.org/forum/?group_id=7403
[ml]: http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=7403


## Thanks

kramdown would not be possible without the prior work of many other people. I want to thank everyone
involved with making Markdown such a nice markup language and especially the developers of other
Markdown implementations because kramdown borrowed many ideas from existing packages.


## Author

* Thomas Leitner
* e-Mail: <t_leitner@gmx.at>
* GPG Key-Id: 0xB2D0A854


[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
[Maruku]:             http://maruku.rubyforge.org
[BlueCloth]: http://www.deveiate.org/projects/BlueCloth


--- name:intro

**kramdown** (sic, not Kramdown or KramDown, just kramdown) is a *free* GPL-licensed
[Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org) library for parsing and converting 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].

It is probably the fastest pure-Ruby Markdown converter available (February 2012), being about 4x
faster than [Maruku] and about 5x faster than [BlueFeather].

[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
[Maruku]: http://maruku.rubyforge.org
[BlueFeather]: http://ruby.morphball.net/bluefeather/index_en.html
