Currently the parser is only useful for a one step process with immediate rendering. However the parser would also be great for use in an editor. For this, it would need to support delayed rendering however, based on the parsed markup tags and offsets. From my observation, this is quite trivial to add, so I did and it works quite well in my work in progress markdown editor. If this RFE is accepted, I will happily supply my changes as a PR to this issue.