Did a little looking and that seems to be correct. I also looked around at the current markdown parsers out there; they didn’t add many features but had many, many revisions. I think this may indicate the difficulty of implementing a markdown parser.
Perhaps markdown may not be the best choice despite it’s “simplicity”. Maybe there are better options available that are newer? Not sure if anything else fits the bill. Perhaps a VERY scaled down html4 would work? There are plenty of editors out there if someone needs hand holding. In some respects html4 and markdown are very similar, however html4 has many more open source parsers, editors etc to to start from.