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# Markdown support

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with a simplistic plain text formatting syntax. It exists in many syntactically different flavors. To support Markdown-based documentation, Sphinx can use recommonmark. recommonmark is a Docutils bridge to CommonMark-py, a Python package for parsing the CommonMark Markdown flavor.

## Configuration

To configure your Sphinx project for Markdown support, proceed as follows:

1. Install recommonmark:

       pip install recommonmark

2. Add the Markdown parser to the `source_parsers` configuration variable in your Sphinx configuration file:

       source_parsers = {
          '.md': 'recommonmark.parser.CommonMarkParser',
       }

   You can replace .md with a filename extension of your choice.

3. Add the Markdown filename extension to the `source_suffix` configuration variable:

       source_suffix = ['.rst', '.md']

4. You can further configure recommonmark to allow custom syntax that standard CommonMark doesn’t support. Read more in the recommonmark documentation.