Content formats

Introduction

You may mix content formats throughout your site. For example:

content/
└── posts/
    ├── post-1.md
    ├── post-2.adoc
    ├── post-3.org
    ├── post-4.pandoc
    ├── post-5.rst
    └── post-6.html

Regardless of content format, all content must have front matter, preferably including both title and date.

Hugo selects the content renderer based on the markup identifier in front matter, falling back to the file extension. See the comparison table table below for a list of markup identifiers and recognized file extensions.

Formats

Markdown

Create your content in Markdown preceded by front matter.

Markdown is Hugo’s default content format. Hugo natively renders Markdown to HTML using Goldmark. Goldmark is fast and conforms to the CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown specifications. You can configure Goldmark in your site configuration.

Hugo provides custom Markdown features including:

Attributes

Apply HTML attributes such as class and id to Markdown images and block elements including blockquotes, fenced code blocks, headings, horizontal rules, lists, paragraphs, and tables.

Extensions

Leverage the embedded Markdown extensions to create tables, definition lists, footnotes, task lists, and more.

Mathematics

Include mathematical equations and expressions in Markdown using LaTeX or TeX typesetting syntax.

Render hooks

Override the conversion of Markdown to HTML when rendering fenced code blocks, headings, images, and links. For example, render every standalone image as an HTML figure element.

HTML

Create your content in HTML preceded by front matter. The content is typically what you would place within an HTML document’s body or main element.

Emacs Org Mode

Create your content in the Emacs Org Mode format preceded by front matter. You can use Org Mode keywords for front matter. See details.

AsciiDoc

Create your content in the AsciiDoc format preceded by front matter. Hugo renders AsciiDoc content to HTML using the Asciidoctor executable. You must install Asciidoctor and its dependencies (Ruby) to use the AsciiDoc content format.

You can configure the AsciiDoc renderer in your site configuration.

In its default configuration, Hugo passes these CLI flags when calling the Asciidoctor executable:

--no-header-footer

The CLI flags passed to the Asciidoctor executable depend on configuration. You may inspect the flags when building your site:

hugo --logLevel info

Pandoc

Create your content in the Pandoc format preceded by front matter. Hugo renders Pandoc content to HTML using the Pandoc executable. You must install Pandoc to use the Pandoc content format.

Hugo passes these CLI flags when calling the Pandoc executable:

--mathjax

reStructuredText

Create your content in the reStructuredText format preceded by front matter. Hugo renders reStructuredText content to HTML using Docutils, specifically rst2html. You must install Docutils and its dependencies (Python) to use the reStructuredText content format.

Hugo passes these CLI flags when calling the rst2html executable:

--leave-comments --initial-header-level=2

Comparison

When converting content to HTML, Hugo uses:

• Native renderers for Markdown, HTML, and Emacs Org mode
• External renderers for AsciiDoc, Pandoc, and reStructuredText

Native renderers are faster than external renderers.