[HN Gopher] Myst Markdown - Markdown for technical/scientific do...
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Myst Markdown - Markdown for technical/scientific document
Author : gmgn
Score : 174 points
Date : 2025-01-02 10:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mystmd.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mystmd.org)
| esafak wrote:
| Looks interesting. The name suggests it uses RestructuredText
| rather than Markdown. Was that the original plan?
|
| Is it appropriate for distill-like articles?
| SllX wrote:
| Their documents say it is a CommonMark superset inspired by
| Sphinx and reStructuredText.
| simonw wrote:
| It's Markdown, but you can use it within the same Sphinx
| ecosystem as reStructuredText.
|
| I use it for a few of my projects and it's fantastic -
| https://llm.datasette.io for example uses MyST Markdown:
| https://github.com/simonw/llm/tree/main/docs
| amatecha wrote:
| No relation to the best-selling 90's PC game "Myst", in case
| anyone was wondering like I was.
| irrational wrote:
| I clicked the link thinking I would see some Myst imagery.
| Nope. Very disappointed.
| carschno wrote:
| Indeed. Which makes it very hard to google.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I miss playing that game. My father bought the special edition
| which came with a journal that you could write your notes in
| it. And we played together taking notes and figuring out the
| puzzles.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I really enjoyed the recent VR remaster re-release of Riven.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I don't have a vr device. Is it in normal mode?
| jcranmer wrote:
| Yes, you can play the rerelease of Riven without VR. I
| did that a few months ago.
| tempodox wrote:
| I was about to warn that this app may be haunted by Sirrus and
| Achenar. You don't take the name of Myst in vain.
| Onawa wrote:
| After reading the introductory page, I don't see any benefit over
| Quarto, and in fact some limitations in comparison.
| astrolx wrote:
| I was going to ask about comparison with quarto. I just managed
| to get a good quarto setup with typst to typeset documents and
| I'm curious about this alternative.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I'd use myst for docs, it's simpler, lighter, and interlinks
| well.
|
| Quarto is more for publications.
| lima wrote:
| Quarto rendering is quite slow compared to Myst. It is more
| focused on R Markdown and Observable JS.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| It's in Hugo already.
| stefanka wrote:
| Do you have a link? I searched and couldn't find it just two
| days ago. The only thing I find is that you can achieve similar
| thing with shortcuts und passthrough.
|
| I'm using Sphinx/Myst/pydata theme for my blog which is a very
| cool combination. But Hugo seems more established.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| https://gohugo.io/content-management/mathematics/
|
| For more complex data visuals there's D3:
| https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery
| ykonstant wrote:
| Is there a way to write a myst markdown file for one page, a tex
| file for another linked page, and have them both compile to html
| seamlessly? I have been doing this with markdown + pandoc for my
| web page, and I wonder if there is something richer than plain
| markdown to use for my non-latex content.
| exceptione wrote:
| I note that it provides a different dialect of md compared to
| Obsidian, especially the syntax for admonitions. If one would
| stray that far, why not AsciiDoc?
|
| Myst provides an AST-spec, but I doubt it would be easy to
| integrate that into Obsidian. Maybe other can shed light on it?
| mfld wrote:
| Instead of AsciiDoc, it originates from the
| Sphinx/ReStrucuredText ecosystem. See
| https://mystmd.org/guide/background
| keybored wrote:
| > If one would stray that far, why not AsciiDoc?
|
| And why AsciiDoc in particular? It lists the inspirations for
| the beyond-Markdown features.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I can't wait for HTML export for Typst.
|
| I am getting a bit tired of all the markdown flavours and
| extensions
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| As a notorious Markdown critic, I have to say, their syntax
| really looks like a decent attempt of support for technical and
| scientific documents. Having used reStructuredText for a thesis
| with a lot of bells and whistles, and having used org-mode mostly
| ever since, I am not just admitting it willy-nilly. Then of
| course some of its syntax and syntax concepts are straight out of
| reStructuredText's book, so it makes sense, that it would inherit
| the capabilities as well.
|
| What I haven't seen at a quick glance is the ability to link to
| any place in the document (sink) from withing the document itself
| (source). Maybe I did not look far enough in the examples.
| reStructuredTex can do this, and org-mode can do that too. And I
| don't mean just linking to existing headings. The other required
| things like footnotes and citations and so on seem to be there.
| Now if this reaches mainstream and we start writing documentation
| in it, there is great potential to have finally good
| documentation, not limited by the likes of github markdown. Of
| course same is true for reStructuredText and org-mode. From that
| perspective, one could ask, why yet another format was necessary,
| rather than improving tooling for lets say reStructuredText.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Org-mode has a new maintainer, and he has invited contributions
| of source code:
|
| https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/org-update/
| jgruber wrote:
| > there is great potential to have finally good documentation
|
| Yes, true, no good documentation has ever been written in
| Markdown. Good point.
| gwern wrote:
| Most Markdown dialects will support some sort of label or
| 'span' naming, which provides link targets (if only by dropping
| down to literal HTML <span>/<div> elements), and it looks like
| this does too: https://mystmd.org/guide/cross-references#label-
| anything
| clcaev wrote:
| Is there a visual editor and auto-formatter that would ease the
| transition for less technical folk? Ideally, it'd be a
| containerized web service with git integration, where proposed
| changes go to a branch.
| irskep wrote:
| This is my favorite syntax for technical writing, but
| unfortunately the only complete implementation is in Python.
| There are half-finished JS projects (last I checked) but nothing
| else. I really wish they were complete so we could use this in
| more places.
|
| I opted for Djot (https://djot.net) as a second-place alternative
| with support for many more languages. My use case was attempting
| a Sphinx alternative in TypeScript. (Link for the curious:
| https://steveasleep.com/djockey/)
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Cool to see that Jupyter is giving MyST a lot of support and
| backing. Sounds like not only does it now have feature parity
| with reST but may even be surpassing reST now.
| boxfire wrote:
| I've really had a pet peeve about footnotes on mobile and this
| does the crime. If you click a footnote and it jumps very far
| away and doesn't have a return navigation, I have left your page
| usually after the second time I see a footnote and didn't note my
| exact scroll. A small thing but pretty please don't make me have
| to hunt for where I was...
| keybored wrote:
| This is such a complicated domain that you have to have some kind
| of function-call looking syntax for extensibility (compared to
| basic lightweight markup which doesn't). So that's fine.
| {rolename}`and here is my role's content!`
|
| I would personally prefer something like Tex here. You just need
| backslashes, square brackets and braces.
|
| I guess this is inspired by Restructured Text. Not a fan of that
| --it looks like the most punctuation-heavy lightweight markup
| language.
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(page generated 2025-01-05 23:01 UTC)