Markdown/Flavor/MultiMarkdown
MultiMarkdown
- Origin & purpose – 2005 ±, Fletcher T. Penney wanted scholarly bells-and-whistles—tables, footnotBest Of Webs-references, math—while staying readable in plain text.
- Syntax extras – footnotes, BibTeX citations, column-aligned tables, LaTeX math, figure/table cGitHubumbering & cross-links, definition lists, smart quotes, perGitHubAML-like metadata headeGitHub
- Data/storage angle – the top-of-file metadata block (
Title: …, custom Key: …) is first-class; multimarkdown --extract=Key makes docs double as lightweight data stores for build pipelines. - **OutpuGitHub DocsPDF, EPUB 3, OPML, Flat ODT, RTF; switch via a single CLI flag.
- Adoption – niche but steady among academic/technical writersGitHuboser & Marked 2 on macOS, Leanpub manuscripts, Joplin table plugin, Pandoc conversions.
- Renderers / bindings
- C reference library libMultiMarkdown-6.
- Python
pymmd wrapper. - Ruby gems
rpeg-multimarkdown2, multimarkdown-cli. GitLab Docsll Pandoc reader/writer. - JavaScript via WASM builds and
markdown-it-multimd-table plugin. - Cross-platform CLI binaries (macOS, Windows, Linux).
- Interactivity – core spec is static; metadata extraction enables build-time automation, and HTML output can host JS (MathJax, charts), but MultiMarkdown itself embeds no runtime widgets.