Gerolf Markup Shredder (GMS) is a parser for text files using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). With the help of the old-and-stable TeX typesetting engine, GMS can produce high-quality Portable Document Files (PDF) as output.

Markup Shredder, however, isn't such an intelligent renderer as Mozilla or Internet Explorer: It cannot handle auto-width tables, and it supports only a subset of HTML element tags, attributes and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) properties. Being a young program, it is also still a bit buggy.

Therefore, users will have to slightly modify their input files to get a satisfactory PDF conversion, and they should acquire basic knowledge of the markup language to do this. GMS includes the necessary literature.

Gerolf Markup Shredder runs under Linux, Dos and Windows on Intel-386 compatible machines. It comes with three different user interfaces:
1. A web browser interface, which allows to execute the GMS main functions with just one mouse click from the button bar. Everything can be displayed within the same framework, even the typesetting result, using the Acrobat Reader plug-in. This interface requires Apache web server.
2. A text mode interface, looking pretty old-fashioned, which is used by default under all supported operating systems. The menu can only be accessed via keystrokes. The input file may be viewed internally, but editor, HTML browser and PDF reader are executed as external programs.
3. A command line interface, fast and simple, which is used behind the scenes by the other interfaces. It may be the best choice on old Dos systems, and it can also be used to integrate Markup Shredder in advanced editors like Emacs (Linux) or HTML-Kit (Windows-32).