markdown-mode 1.8

markdown-mode version 1.8 was released on August 12, 2011.

Development can be followed by cloning the Git repository:

git clone git://jblevins.org/git/markdown-mode.git

or browsing the cgit interface.

Thanks to the many contributors who offered patches and submitted bug reports, this version is much more robust and includes many new features, some of which are listed below.

Syntax highlighting:
- Improve syntax highlighting of preformatted text blocks to better distinguish them from list items with hanging indentation and nested list items.
- Match italic and bold text and inline code fragments across line breaks, within a single block, but prevent them from matching across blocks.
- Generally improve multi-line font lock by extending the search region to include full blocks.
Automatic indentation and indentation cycling:
- Fixed an issue, reported by Joost Kremners, where for multi-line lists, the position of the list marker was not being added to the list of possible indentation levels.
- Make indentation work when the previous line is not indented.
- Avoid a problem where indentation positions were getting skipped over when tab cycling.
- Fixed an issue when column 0 is the natural automatic indentation stop.
- Set tab width to 4, the natural tab width for Markdown documents.
- Stop announcing “TAB” in the minibuffer when tab is pressed.
XHTML output improvements:
- Arbitrary content may to be added to the <head> block during XHTML output to allow for flexible local customizations. See markdown-xhtml-header-content.
- New XHTML export options: export to a file with C-c C-c e or export to a file and view with C-c C-c v.
- Support Markdown processors which produce standalone output (i.e., complete XHTML documents). If this is detected, by matching markdown-xhtml-standalone-regexp in the first five lines of output, then omit the markdown-mode header and footer.
- Thanks to Philippe Ivaldi for patches.
- Support Markdown processors which do not accept input from stdin (i.e, Python-Markdown) by adding the markdown-command-needs-filename custom option. Thanks to Jeremiah Dodds for a patch.
- Use html-mode for viewing Markdown output.
- Ensure Markdown output buffer is always raised, even when the output is short.
Wiki link functionality:
- Add support for following wiki links in a buffer, either with C-c C-f or, optionally, RET, when the point is at a wiki link.
- Customizable following behavior using markdown-follow-wiki-link-on-enter.
- Followed wiki links are opened using markdown-mode.
- Quick navigation to the previous and next wiki links using M-p and M-n.
- Wiki links to non-existant files (missing links) are highlighted differently.
- Based on functionality from wiki-mode by Alex Schroeder.
- Thanks to Eric Merritt for patches.
GitHub-Flavored Markdown mode (gfm-mode):
- Turns on longlines-mode and auto-fill-mode.
- Thanks to Edward O’Connor for the patch.
Miscellaneous:
- Add outline-mode-like keybindings for fast outline navigation of atx-style (hash mark) headers (see the updated documentation for details).
- Support a customizable horizontal rule string markdown-hr-string. This replaces the previous but less flexible custom option markdown-hr-length, which has been removed.
- Make sure horizontal rules inserted by C-c - (markdown-insert-hr) are surrounded by blank lines.
- Prevent infinite loops during blockquote (C-c C-s b) and preformatted (C-c C-s p) block insertion while at the beginning or end of the buffer.
- Added an autoload cookie. Thanks to Peter S. Galbraith for the patch.