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Markdown is
a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
This page is maintained by and for the markdown community to document various tools and resources available to document authors and developers, as well as implementors of the various markdown implementations.
Coming soon...
Whether you're building a web site, a text editor, or something else, if your project needs to process markdown documents, you'll need to chose an implementation of a parser library. While the language your project is coded in will likely have the largest impact on which implementation you chose, there are a number of other factors to consider. Is performance a high priority? Perhaps bindings to a C library will suit you best. Will untrusted users be able to post documents to your web site? Be sure you are sanitizing the HTML to avoid XSS attacks and the like. Do you want to offer support for a superset of Markdown's syntax? Will you be writting your own superset? Some implementations come as/is, while others have varying degrees of customizability. Will your project have an international audience? Perhaps an implementation that supports Unicode input and/or right-to-left text is right for you.
If you would like to develop your own implementation of the parser, you may want to take a look at the rather lengthy list of existing implementations already out there (if your implementation is missing from the list, please add it). Obviously, not every one of those implementations parses markdown text in exactly the same way. As this fragmentation of Markdown can cause frustration to the document author, it is important to be aware of the existing implementations and how they behave. The very useful tool, Babelmark 2, has been provided by John MacFarlane to compare the output of various implementations. See John's FAQ to add your implementation. The FAQ also discusses why this all matters and provides examples of some common edge cases that various implementations disagree on.