Installing lowdown from source

2024-04-23 | updated 2025-04-04

#linux
#markdown
#procedure
#tool

Lowdown is a markdown translator written in C, with no dependencies.

The version in Debian bookworm is 1.0.0. The version in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is 1.1.0. To install the latest stable version (2.0.2 at time of writing), it must be compiled from source.

Procedure based on https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/.

Download the sources:

cd Downloads
curl -O https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/snapshots/lowdown.tar.gz
curl -O https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/snapshots/lowdown.tar.gz.sha512
sha512sum -c lowdown.tar.gz.sha512
tar xf lowdown.tar.gz

Then compile and install to ~/.local/:

cd lowdown-2.0.2/
./configure PREFIX=$HOME/.local
bmake
bmake regress
bmake install

Lowdown emits lots of character entities (e.g. / for /), so it might be worth piping the output through HTML Tidy.

To install it on Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install tidy

Default settings can be set in the config file ~/.tidyrc, e.g.

tidy-mark: no
wrap: 80