Markus is GitHub Flavored Markdown with a small vocabulary for layout intent. You write Markdown; where Markdown cannot say what you mean, you add a colon-fenced directive.

Install

Markus needs Python 3.10 or newer. The package is anthus-markus, the module is markusmd, and the command is markus.

pip install anthus-markus

Write a page

Save this as page.md. The preview beside it is what Markus renders.

---
title: Release notes
description: What changed this week.
---

We shipped **three** improvements.

:::callout{kind="tip" title="Upgrade now"}
Every change is backward compatible.
:::

::metric{value="38" unit="%" label="Faster builds" delta="-38%"}

Convert it

markus convert page.md -o page.html

convert writes a complete HTML document with Markus's stylesheet inlined. Useful options:

Check it

markus validate page.md
markus ast page.md

validate reports the first unknown directive, unknown attribute, or misplaced child with its line number. ast prints the validated document as JSON: front matter and an ordered list of directive and Markdown block nodes.

Edit with a live preview

markus preview page.md

preview opens a local editor with the rendered page beside the source.

Use it from Python

from markusmd import convert, parse, parse_document

html = convert(open("page.md", encoding="utf-8").read())
fragment = convert(source, full_document=False, include_css=False)

document = parse(source)           # validated AST: Document, Directive, MarkdownBlock
tree = parse_document(source)      # the same structure as plain JSON-ready data

Invalid source raises MarkusSyntaxError or MarkusValidationError, both subclasses of MarkusError, each with a line attribute.

Where to next

• Syntax and metadata covers the rules every directive shares.
• The feature index lists every directive with its page.