Getting started

Open in

carta reads a document in one markup format and writes it back out in another. It ships as a single binary.

Install

Download the archive for your platform from the latest release. Builds are provided for Linux (x86-64 gnu, static musl, and arm64), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Windows (x86-64).

With cargo-binstall, the matching prebuilt binary is fetched directly:

cargo binstall carta

cargo install carta

This builds every format carta supports. To build a smaller binary, see choosing formats at compile time.

git clone https://github.com/mfkrause/carta
cd carta
cargo build --release
# binary at target/release/carta

Your first conversion

Convert a Markdown file to HTML:

carta -f commonmark -t html input.md -o output.html

Or pipe through stdin and stdout, which is what carta does when no path is given:
Terminal window
```
echo '# Hello' | carta -f commonmark -t html
```

Ask the build what it can do:

carta --list-input-formats
carta --list-output-formats
carta --list-extensions=gfm

-f/--from and -t/--to name the source and target formats. Both accept extension toggles, so -f markdown+hard_line_breaks-raw_html reads Pandoc Markdown with hard line breaks on and raw HTML off.

Standalone documents

By default carta emits a document fragment. -s/--standalone wraps it in the target format's scaffold, and the usual document switches work alongside it:

carta -f commonmark -t html -s --toc --number-sections input.md -o output.html

Choosing formats at compile time

Each reader and writer sits behind its own Cargo feature (read-* and write-*). A build that names only the ones you need carries neither the code nor the dependencies of the rest:

cargo install carta --no-default-features --features cli,read-commonmark,write-html

The full feature, on by default, turns on every format.

Where to go next

Formats: what carta reads and writes, and the gaps that remain.
CLI: every flag, grouped by task.
Library: using carta as a Rust dependency.