The purpose of this library is to provide Clojure with native support for Markdown and other text-based authoring formats such as Org-mode.

Existing Markdown implementations in other languages are available to Clojure developers but these all combine a parser front-end to Markdown with a backend emitter (ie. HTML). For these to be used in Clojure the developer has to parse the result back into Clojure structures for further processing.

A more efficient and flexible approach is to have the Markdown front-end create a native Clojure data structure (maps and vectors) that can be manipulated by functions and emitted into HTML using prxml, hiccup or a custom renderer. This also makes it easy to support other output formats, for example, DocBook XML as part of a professional publishing toolchain.

Another possibility would be to include rich text in a web application based on Compojure (hiccup).

The overall aim is to pass all Markdown tests but while making it easier to configure and create extensions that can adapt the library to different Markdown flavors.

The library is optimised for correctness over performance. In certain cases where performance is not critical is will likely be adequate (documentation build systems). For high-performance web-pages, use a cache policy where Markdown is used for static content (i.e., generate the content once and cache it in memory).

This project supports both Maven and leiningen.

Swank support is included for both systems.

Currently this objective has not been reached and this library remains in a work-in-progress 'alpha' state. Once the library fully passes the entire Markdown test suite a version 1.0 will be released.