from multimark import markdown_to_html
markdown_to_html("Hello, **world**!")'<p>Hello, <strong>world</strong>!</p>\n'Introduction
This page gives you a high-level understanding of what multimark does, why it exists, and what you can accomplish with it.
What Is Multimark?
Multimark is a Python package that provides bindings to cmark-gfm, GitHub’s fork of the CommonMark reference parser. It gives you fast, spec-compliant Markdown parsing and rendering in five output formats: HTML, LaTeX, groff man pages, XML, and normalized CommonMark.
The C library is vendored and compiled at install time via CFFI, so there are no system dependencies to manage. You get a single pip install and immediate access to the same Markdown engine that powers GitHub.
Why Use Multimark?
Most Python Markdown libraries are written in pure Python, which means they trade performance for portability. Multimark takes a different approach: it wraps a battle-tested C library that processes millions of documents daily on GitHub. This gives you parsing speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than pure-Python alternatives, with guaranteed spec compliance.
Beyond speed, multimark supports the full set of GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) extensions: tables, strikethrough, autolinks, tag filtering, and task lists. These are the same extensions that GitHub uses when rendering README files, issues, and pull requests.
Output Formats at a Glance
Multimark renders parsed Markdown into five distinct formats, each suited to different use cases.
Available formats
| Format | Function | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| HTML | markdown_to_html() | Web pages, documentation sites, email |
| LaTeX | markdown_to_latex() | Academic papers, PDF generation |
| Man page | markdown_to_man() | Unix manual pages |
| XML | markdown_to_xml() | AST inspection, toolchain integration |
| CommonMark | markdown_to_commonmark() | Normalization, round-trip formatting |
All renderers share the same parser and accept the same set of options, so switching between output formats requires changing only the function name.
A Quick Taste
Here is the simplest possible use of multimark: converting a Markdown string to HTML.
The function returns the rendered output as a Python string. Every renderer works this way: pass in Markdown text, get back the rendered result.
Next Steps
The pages that follow will walk you through installation, a more thorough quickstart, and then progressively deeper topics. If you prefer to jump straight to the API reference, each function is fully documented with executable examples in the Reference section.