Markdown text in iA Writer

I was confronted by the technology decision lately of chosing a ruby markdown library for a Rails project. The following overview was mostly of personal interest, but may be helpful for other people too. For errata or missing libraries please contact me via the comments form.

These were my requisites

• Support for tables
• Active development
• Support for Latex/PDF export (alternative via other markup language) ^A
• Native markdown support for id/class ^A
• Pure ruby (no C extensions) ^A

^A optional

Candidates	tables	pdf	pure ruby	Active developmentB	License	Remarks
Github Markup ↩			✓	✓	MIT	1
Markup ↩			✓
Redcarpet ↩	✓		✓	✓		1, 2
RDiscount ↩				✓	BSD	3
Bluecloth ↩			✓
Bluecloth 2 ↩			✓
kramdown ↩	✓	✓	✓	✓	MIT
Maruku ↩		✓	✓	✓	MIT	4

Non-ruby implementations

Candidates	tables	pdf	pure ruby	Active developmentB	License
pandoc-markdown ↩	✓	✓	-	✓	GPL
MultiMarkdown ↩ (aka MultiMarkdown.pl)	✓	✓	-
MultiMarkdown ↩ (aka peg-multimarkdown or MultiMarkdown v3)	✓	✓	-
MultiMarkdown 4 ↩	✓	✓	-	✓	GPL/MIT

Remarks

1. Redcarpet is the Github Markdown rendering library used in Github Markdown
2. This document is a markdown file rendered with Redcarpet (via Middleman), see here
3. RDiscount is a wrapper for Discount (Discount is an implementation of John Gruber’s Markdown markup language in C)
4. Support for tables via inline HTML

^B I presume a project with multiple commits to the project repository in the last 12 months as in active development.