BlueCloth

BlueCloth is a Ruby implementation of  Markdown, 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).

See the AboutMarkdown page for an example of the syntax.

Benchmarks

Here's a benchmark that compares the render time of all the Ruby Markdown implementations I know about, generated using this script:

$ ruby experiments/benchmark.rb 
Markdown -> HTML, 100 iterations (experiments/benchmark.txt, 8064 bytes)
Rehearsal --------------------------------------------------------------------
OldBlueCloth (1.1.0)              10.580000   0.900000  11.480000 ( 11.489173)
BlueCloth (2.0.5)                  0.060000   0.000000   0.060000 (  0.063826)
RDiscount (1.3.5)                  0.050000   0.000000   0.050000 (  0.049660)
Maruku (3.1.7.2)                   5.580000   0.050000   5.630000 (  5.640067)
PEGMarkdown (1.4.4)                0.510000   0.000000   0.510000 (  0.544883)
BlueFeather (0.30)                16.130000   5.790000  21.920000 ( 21.940418)
Tartan::Markdown::Parser (0.2.1)  14.940000   0.190000  15.130000 ( 15.131116)
---------------------------------------------------------- total: 54.780000sec

                                       user     system      total        real
OldBlueCloth (1.1.0)              10.440000   0.830000  11.270000 ( 11.275649)
BlueCloth (2.0.5)                  0.050000   0.000000   0.050000 (  0.047684)
RDiscount (1.3.5)                  0.050000   0.000000   0.050000 (  0.051337)
Maruku (3.1.7.2)                   5.370000   0.030000   5.400000 (  5.399795)
PEGMarkdown (1.4.4)                0.510000   0.000000   0.510000 (  0.521175)
BlueFeather (0.30)                15.990000   5.850000  21.840000 ( 21.891749)
Tartan::Markdown::Parser (0.2.1)  15.050000   0.210000  15.260000 ( 15.282587)

Links

Here are some other projects that use BlueCloth:

• Instiki -  http://www.instiki.org/
• Eribium -  http://www.eribium.org/
• Pimki -  http://pimki.rubyforge.org/

Downloads

• RubyGem: BlueCloth-1.0.1.gem (48.00 k)
• RubyGem: bluecloth-2.0.10.gem (129.00 k)
• Tar+Bzip2: bluecloth-2.0.10.tar.bz2 (102.52 k)
• Tar+Gzip: bluecloth-2.0.10.tar.gz (116.28 k)
• Zip: bluecloth-2.0.10.zip (166.24 k)

Development

You can also check out the current development source with Mercurial like this:

hg clone http://repo.deveiate.org/Arrow

Trac Information

• TracGuide -- Built-in Documentation
•  The Trac project -- Trac Open Source Project
•  Trac FAQ -- Frequently Asked Questions
• TracSupport -- Trac Support

For a complete list of local wiki pages, see TitleIndex.