Rendering Process

Like Jekyll, Jigyll renders each file in stages, with the output of one stage feeding the next:

1. Front matter is read and stripped from the file.
2. Liquid expressions in the body are evaluated.
3. Converters run, based on the file's extension — Markdown becomes HTML, Sass/SCSS becomes CSS. Markdown inside a .html file remains untouched.
4. Layouts wrap the result: the layout from the page's front matter is rendered around the content, and each layout's own layout: key chains to its parent, Russian-doll style. Layout bodies are processed as Liquid only, never as Markdown.

Files without front matter are copied verbatim as static files (unless the jekyll-optional-front-matter plugin is enabled).

Differs from Jekyll. Sass/SCSS files skip the Liquid stage entirely — the body after front matter goes straight to the Sass compiler. In Jekyll, a Sass file is a page like any other and may contain Liquid.

Markdown: goldmark, not kramdown

Markdown is rendered by goldmark, a CommonMark engine, with GitHub Flavored Markdown extensions — tables, strikethrough, autolinks, task lists — plus definition lists and footnotes. The renderer is not configurable: markdown: and kramdown: settings in _config.yml are ignored.

Most Markdown renders identically. The differences that matter:

• Raw < and > are treated as HTML. This is <b>bold</b> renders as bold text. This matches the Markdown spec but differs from kramdown's default escaping.
• No smart quotes. kramdown typographically curls quotes by default; goldmark leaves them straight. (The smartify Liquid filter is available when you want that.)
• Math is not supported. $...$ and $$...$$ pass through as literal text.
• No table of contents. kramdown's TOC marker is not expanded. Use a Liquid loop or hand-written links instead.

Header IDs

Headings get auto-generated id attributes, but the algorithm differs from kramdown's:

• Punctuation becomes a hyphen, not the empty string: ## Either/or gets #either-or (kramdown: #eitheror); ## I'm Lucky gets #i-m-lucky (kramdown: #im-lucky).
• HTML inside a heading is ignored when computing the ID — only the text counts.
• Non-ASCII characters are dropped, not transliterated.
• Duplicate IDs get -1, -2, … suffixes.

You can always set an explicit ID with an inline attribute list: ## My Heading {: #my-id}.

Inline attribute lists

kramdown-style inline attribute lists (IALs) on headings — {: .class #id key="value"} — are supported; they are rewritten to goldmark's attribute syntax before parsing.

Differs from Jekyll. The IAL rewrite is a plain text substitution over the whole file, so a literal {: ...} inside a code span or code block is also rewritten (the colon disappears). Not supported at all: attribute list definitions (ALDs, reusable {:refname: ...} sets) and markdown="span" / markdown="block" on HTML elements — markdown="1" works.

Syntax highlighting

Fenced code blocks and the {% highlight %} tag are highlighted by chroma, emitting Rouge-compatible CSS classes — your existing Pygments/Rouge stylesheet works unchanged. The linenos argument to {% highlight %} adds line numbers; fenced code blocks don't support line numbers. Code fences with an unrecognized language are wrapped in plain <pre><code>.