About the idea of using po4a here, I think that it perfectly makes sense (disclamer: I'm one of the authors of po4a).

We already have an existing markdown parser, but it's ... not rock stable and changing it may be more complex than rewriting a new parser. What would remain is the surrounding infrastructure of po4a, which makes the conversion between documentation formats and PO files easier, and the tests.

My plan to improve the support of Markdown in po4a is to simplify the existing parser (its code is convoluted), and then improve its robustness using for example the tests from https://github.com/bobtfish/text-markdown/tree/master/t

Markdown is not very complex compared to other formats we handler pretty well in po4a (eg, groff of man pages or XML plus the docbook and HTML variants). For both formats, we use internal parses with no dependency to external tool or library. This is because the kind of parsing that we are doing is specific, so we felt it easier this way.

The groff parser is interesting in the sense that it really normalizes the input. There is maybe 6 ways to specify the inline formatting (bold, italic), and po4a converts them all to one form only to ease the life of translators. I'm not sure that it will be mandated for the markdown parser, but that's something to consider. The XML parser is interesting because it is difficult to have a line-by-line parser of XML, just as it happens to be in markdown. So the solution built in the XML parser could be useful to rework the markdown parser: instead of the line by line parser that we currently have, we could go for a block by block approach. That would help supporting the bits that are currently not supported.

Edit: we also have some format parsers that are using external tools in po4a. The POD parser is using a dedicated Perl library while the SGML parser is using the onsgml external parser. On another front, I am considering whether asciidoctor could be used as an external parser for the AsciiDoc format. If someone knows a parser for markdown that works a bit like a SAX parser, that may be an interesting starting point, maybe.

I'm willing to help any volunteer, but my personal schedule does not allow me to address this issue alone anytime soon.

Oh. And po4a is written in Perl. Sorry about that...

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Markdown files support #3106

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