Discount is a free and open source implementation of John Gruber`s Markdown text to html language.
There`s not much here that differentiates it from any of the existing Markdown implementations except that it`s written in C instead of one of the vast flock of scripting languages that are fighting it out for the Perl crown.
Markdown provides a library that gives you formatting functions suitable for marking down entire documents or lines of text, a command-line program that you can use to mark down documents interactively or from a script, and a tiny (1 program so far) suite of example programs that show how to fully utilize the markdown library.
Discount also does, by default, various smartypants-style substitutions.
Installation: To build discount, untar your selected tarball, cd into the directory it creates, then do configure.sh to generate your Makefiles. After doing this, a make should give you a functional stack of programs and libraries.
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Finishes support for php markdown extra-style footnotes by documenting them, fixing one small initialization bug, and by creating the new public function mkd_ref_prefix() which changes the name= part of the forest of tags from fn:N and fnref:N to {your prefix}:N and {your prefix}ref:N (allows someone to footnote individual articles on a weblog where each article is rendered individually.)
· A few manpage typos are also corrected thanks to a patch from Alessandro Ghedini.