[HN Gopher] Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system
___________________________________________________________________
Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system
Author : asicsp
Score : 562 points
Date : 2025-06-03 08:06 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| structural wrote:
| Would be interesting to see a compare and contrast between this
| and Typst, which has gotten a lot of attention recently.
|
| Kinda surprising that it isn't mentioned in their feature
| comparison matrix at all.
| junon wrote:
| Last I checked Typst can't emit HTML.
| divan wrote:
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/
| lblume wrote:
| They do now, experimentally. The support is getting improved
| a lot currently.
| sureglymop wrote:
| That's really cool! Would love to create my website with
| that and also make it available as a pdf for easy archival.
| enricozb wrote:
| It works really well, I've written three blog posts using
| typst.
|
| Post: https://ezb.io/thoughts/interaction_nets/lambda_calcu
| lus/202...
|
| Typst source: https://github.com/enricozb/enricozb.github.i
| o/blob/master/t...
| blacksqr wrote:
| I've also heard that pandoc now supports typst, and will
| turn typst format files into html, independent of typst's
| own code. Have not confirmed.
| shark1 wrote:
| It is mentioned now. Btw, it looks very similar to.
| skrebbel wrote:
| This is so powerful, it makes me wonder why they didn't just make
| a new markdowny syntax for Latex so they could reuse everything
| from the Latex ecosystem. A bit like what CoffeeScript was for
| JavaScript, I mean.
| Timwi wrote:
| That assumes that the only issue with LaTeX is its syntax.
| Other issues I can think of are that LaTeX doesn't generate
| HTML and that LaTeX is completely Unicode-disabled.
| genewitch wrote:
| How do the science and math papers use characters that aren't
| in... ASCII? Maybe I need to look at an ASCII chart.
|
| Out of curiosity, isn't UTF implementation much easier now
| than it has been? I piddle in writing things and I rarely
| contemplate UTF. Once I tried to reverse engineer an
| encryption plugin that used Asiatic characters as the
| ciphertext, and I wanted to use emoji, and that was when I
| learned I am too dumb to understand utf. But there's
| libiconv, which I first saw in production (ICQ or aim or
| Trillian or so) over 22 years ago, personally.
|
| So is the latex thing obstinance, technical, or political?
| yannis wrote:
| Sorry you need to catch up! The latest LaTeX engines
| (LuaLaTeX) can even do unicode math! But yes the Unicode
| spec s not something one can understand in a few hours.
| yannis wrote:
| Your statement is not correct, LuaLaTeX can output any
| unicode character you need and also you can use Lua as well
| for scripting.
| michal_h21 wrote:
| Other incorrect statement is that LaTeX cannot generate
| HTML. There is number of projects for LaTeX to HTML
| conversion (TeX4ht, Lwarp, LaTeXML), also Pandoc can
| convert subset of LaTeX to HTML.
| yannis wrote:
| Absolutely; One should also keep in mind why do you need
| the HTML, drop the pdf file on Google drive, and it will
| serve it fine, no webservers can limit who can see it, no
| friction for authorizations etc. Granted difficult to
| view on a mobile, but who can really do serious reading
| of a paper on mobile?
| eviks wrote:
| You'll likely lose a lot of the ecosystem since a lot of stuff
| wouldn't expect such a syntax.
| speerer wrote:
| I'm very excited to boot up and try this. I may have finally
| found what I need to replace my rickety pipeline of templates and
| pandoc conversions.
| majkinetor wrote:
| I keep mine tidy in a docker image and use it on bunch of
| projects: https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs
|
| As a comparison to scripting features of Quarkdown, above uses
| macros plugin which enables python scripting
| speerer wrote:
| Thank you for the inspiration. I'm going to look through this
| with interest too.
|
| I see somebody else downvoted me: presumably they didn't like
| my excitement! I appreciate the positivity here.
| majkinetor wrote:
| You are welcome. If you want to try this system, I will be
| glad to help onboarding.
| genewitch wrote:
| HN is fickle, it'll revert, faster if you don't mention it.
|
| I have a couple of "proprietary" pipelines that I'd love to
| replace, and this also gave me an idea.
|
| For instance when I want to publish a screenshot from
| windows to my fediverse homeserver, I want it to be as few
| kilobytes as possible, as I've run a homeserver and the
| storage needs are obnoxious, so I do my part. Windows takes
| massive screenshots, embarrassing even by windows 95 bitmap
| screenshot standards. So win+shift+s, crop selection, win -
| ms <enter>, shift+insert, ctrl+shift+x, file->save as JPEG,
| name, enter.
|
| As few as three years ago if I cropped right I could paste
| the clipboard JPEG and all was well. It doesn't take me
| long but every time I do it I get three more grey hairs.
| And I take a lot of screenshots. 2,209 in my screenshot
| folder. did you know windows saves all your screenshots?
| they used to be ephemeral.
|
| anyhow i have a bunch of screwy things _similar_ to but not
| as "simple" as that example. Audio work, text work, data
| manipulation.
| Onawa wrote:
| Maybe look at Quarto? Almost every project I start now begins
| with `quarto project create`. From there I can pivot the
| material into HTML, .docx, PDF, .PPTX, Typst, LaTeX, and all of
| them simultaneously.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Which editor or environment do you use to edit these?
| Onawa wrote:
| VSCode and RStudio Desktop both have visual editor
| components, although they are not perfect. Positron is
| another editor that is data science specific built on top
| of VSCode that has Quarto rendering support.
|
| There isn't an 'on-the-fly' rendering component for Quarto
| per se, but using the preview mode it will re-render a
| preview watching for file changes. A nice GUI editor for
| Quarto is definitely something people have been asking for.
| Closest equivalent would probably be Overleaf or Typst web
| editors?
| account-5 wrote:
| How is this different from Quarto [0]? Quite similar in name,
| same extension, appears the same aims, but at the minute less
| functionality.
|
| [0] https://quarto.org/
| tecleandor wrote:
| I guess that the similarity of the names come from different
| places, and in this case might be a remembrance of QuarkXPress.
| It's convergent evolution! :D
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yeah that's the immediate connection I got too.
|
| I like the syntax.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I guessed the name derived as follows: Quarks as the smallest
| particles, a view in most detail, the building blocks of
| things. Typesetting as the lowest level of abstraction for
| creating a document, "down" from Markdown.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| People may not know it but at some point in the nineties
| you'd enter a bookstore and 95%+ of all the books and
| magazines were typeset using QuarkXPress.
|
| Then Adobe's InDesign showed up in 1999 and things began to
| change.
|
| FWIW I both wrote and typeset books myself (for a traditional
| publisher): I did most of them using QuarkXPress but I
| managed to sneak one I made with LaTeX (it was a hard sell to
| the publisher / printing press guys who were only ever using
| QuarkXPress). Also I was forced to heavily modify LaTeX
| templates to match exactly the one the publisher was using
| with QuarkXPress.
|
| So yup when I read _" Quarkdown is a modern Markdown-based
| typetting system"_ the first thing I think about is
| QuarkXPress: great memories of MacOS (8? then 9?, pre OS X
| for sure) and my Sony Trinitron monitor.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| QuarkXpress for typesetting, Photoshop for painting pixels,
| and Macromedia Freehand for turning scanned drawings into
| vector graphics.
|
| Was still using these in the early 2000s. Good times.
|
| https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/american-overseas-
| scho...
| jsilence wrote:
| Also let's not forget that Quarto is the spiritual successor of
| the widely successful R Markdown ecosystem. By the same
| developers: https://quarto.org/docs/faq/#who-are-the-
| developers-of-quart...
| riskassessment wrote:
| Not just the spiritual successor but also backwards
| compatible in that Quarto can render R Markdown files (in
| addition to the newer quarto .qmd spec).
| riedel wrote:
| Was going to ask the same question. Was talking to a friend
| just 2 days ago who redid all his lecture scripts with quarto
| and embedded the lecture presentations. Looked neat. Also that
| quarto interacts well with R studio and jupyter notebooks comes
| as a big plus.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Typst is missing from comparison
| atoav wrote:
| Is this standalone, as in: an actual file format people can
| use? From their website it looks like it won't work without
| using their service or hosting something yourself?
| enkursigilo wrote:
| Yes, there is a standalone compiler for typst that you can
| use offline for free. Source code is here
| https://github.com/typst/typst/
| ouked wrote:
| Looks like you can compile files as shown here:
| https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#usage
| TheEdonian wrote:
| I like it for what it is, a layer on top of markdown. That said,
| the main usage of markdown for me is that it's just the content
| and it doesn't have any opinions on the layout let alone logic.
|
| I can add those with the use of css/js for web and interpreters
| and themes for print/non web.
| randomtoast wrote:
| I would like to have a compiled demo PDF available for download,
| along with a direct comparison of the same paper created in
| LaTeX. I would like to see the differences both on screen and in
| print.
| asplake wrote:
| Nice! Any plans for epub?
| sgt wrote:
| If the LLM's are starting to output Quarkdown by default - even
| just one provider (like OpenAI), this will catch on like
| wildfire. The limitations of Markdown is getting a bit old.
| revskill wrote:
| Yes, any alternatives which invented their own syntax which is
| not markdown is just a waste of everything.
| eviks wrote:
| The base markdown is too primitive to use without extensions,
| so aren't most used markdowns actually invent their own syntax?
| artemonster wrote:
| Are there fexprs too? I.e. lambdas that dont evaluate their
| arguments eagerly but wait until explicit evaluation?
| skwee357 wrote:
| This looks very interesting and more approachable than Typst.
|
| As some who uses headless chrome to turn html into pdf (for
| invoices), I have been looking for something simpler and faster.
|
| I tried typst, but it felt messy to me. I wonder if quarkdown
| offers more streamlined experience
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| > I tried typst, but it felt messy to me.
|
| What exactly is messy about Typst?
| skwee357 wrote:
| The syntax feels complicated. Maybe I just don't have enough
| patience for learning a typesetting syntax (I never worked
| with Latex before).
|
| On top of that, there is no easy way to create a template.
| For example, I want an invoice template which I can reuse
| with different data. Theoretically, I can create a typ file
| for the template, and define the invoice as a function which
| I then call from a string with, say, json data. It seems
| great as web service, but not as a library I can use from,
| say, Rust.
|
| And the type system is a bit confusing. I can define basic
| types like numbers or string, but when it comes to structs,
| they don't seem to have support for that.
|
| I find it easier to create a handlebars template, and feed
| the HTML to headless chrome printing service, which will
| output a PDF for me. It's not scalable for high volume, but
| good enough for my needs (takes about 2-3 seconds to generate
| PDF).
| lugao wrote:
| > On top of that, there is no easy way to create a template
|
| Templates are just functions [0].
|
| I think much of the frustration comes from typesetting
| being a harder problem than it seems at first. In general a
| typesetting system tries to abstract away how layout is
| recomputed depending on content.
|
| Supporting contextual content -- cases where the content
| depend on other content, e.g. numbered lists, numbered
| figures, references, etc -- involves iterative rendering.
| This is evidentidly a complexity sinkhole and having a
| turing complete script language will bite you back when
| dealing with it. I recommend reding their documentation
| about it [1] where they explain how they propose solving
| this problem.
|
| [0]: https://typst.app/docs/tutorial/making-a-template/
|
| [1]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/context/#compiler-
| iteration...
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| WEasyPrint is great for generating invoices from html!
|
| https://weasyprint.org/
|
| Also the only good implementation of web layout/rendering I've
| seen done in python.
| skwee357 wrote:
| Whats the difference between them and running a headless
| chrome docker container?
| istjohn wrote:
| WEasyPrint's Github:
|
| > From a technical point of view, WeasyPrint is a visual
| rendering engine for HTML and CSS that can export to PDF.
| It aims to support web standards for printing. WeasyPrint
| is free software made available under a BSD license.
|
| > It is based on various libraries but not on a full
| rendering engine like WebKit or Gecko. The CSS layout
| engine is written in Python, designed for pagination, and
| meant to be easy to hack on.
| genewitch wrote:
| Cool, not who you replied to but this is a cool idea,
| another way to archive pages. Gotta compare it to
| singlefile and headless chrome - I've been looking for a
| faster way to get a snapshot of a webpage via a chatbot
| (like in discord or matrix). Used to use Firefox
| headless, but large pages/slower sites would time out the
| api.
| skwee357 wrote:
| Had a chance to read the wiki/docs deeper. Quarkdown seems to
| use puppeteer and chrome-print-to-pdf to generate PDF from HTML
| [1].
|
| So, aside from the more minimal format or Markdown compared to
| HTML, I don't see much appeal in quarkdown compared to feeding
| HTML to a headless chrome instance.
|
| But it is a cool project if one wants to turn a bunch of
| markdown files to say a book or an article.
|
| [1] https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/wiki/pdf-export
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| very nice and would be cool for scientific publishing, but
| without the publishers (or community) offering templates it'll
| never fly
| ouked wrote:
| Looks cool - is this "backwards compatible" with Markdown? As in,
| could a Quarkdown file be legible from a regular Markdown
| renderer?
| enriquto wrote:
| The comparison to LaTeX is a bit unfair... the latex code is much
| larger than it needs to, and does things that the quarkdown
| doesn't (like floating the figure in the page).
|
| Once you remove that, both versions look essentially equivalent
| and just as readable.
| eviks wrote:
| If the sea of backslashes and _\begin /end_ and
| _\includegraphics_ doesn 't disappear, no, latex doesn't look
| equivalent
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The words "begin" and "end" are very readable, actually.
| "includegraphics" as well. Remains the aversion against
| backslashes. What exactly do you find less readable about
| them than other symbols like for example the colons or braces
| in Quarkdown? Or is it about the number of backslashes?
| eviks wrote:
| Actually, no, if markup takes more space than content, it
| hurts readability of the content. Especially for such
| common stuff like images.
|
| But if you don't see this obvious barrier, I will unlikely
| be able to explain the issue with backslashes: it's
| partially about the number, but also visibility - .period
| syntax is a smart choice as it's unobtrusive and not part
| of the regular syntax, and it's more ergonomic to type, so
| a universal win.
| rendaw wrote:
| This, Typst, etc etc are primarily typesetting systems _for
| papers_.
|
| I would love alternatives to HTML or whatever, but I tried Typst
| too and it's very clear that the authors only really care about
| typesetting for papers and other long form prose. Stuff like
| forms, invoices, flyers, handouts, leaflets, business cards -- an
| afterthought, at best.
|
| Edit: Actually I was thinking of Sile not Typst, but I think the
| same applies to Typst too. I didn't dig into Typst too much
| because it was commercial though.
| dleeftink wrote:
| You may be familiar already, but does paged.js fit your bill?
|
| [0]: https://github.com/pagedjs/pagedjs
| rendaw wrote:
| That looks interesting, and to be fair right now I'm doing
| something similar... but doing headless rendering with that
| sort of stuff is very hard, AFAIK the standard tool for that
| has been abandoned now for a couple years. Also there are
| other issues with browsers, like creating CMYK PDFs.
| freefrog334433 wrote:
| The online editor is commercial. They have a github repository
| releasing Typst under an Apache 2.0 license for free. I
| installed it using cargo (Rust), and don't use the online
| editor.
| rendaw wrote:
| Oh, I didn't realize that! I can't shake the feeling that the
| open source community engagement might cater to paying
| customers, but I'll need to take a closer look!
| andy12_ wrote:
| Is there any reason why you can't use Typst for any of the
| stuff you mentioned? I can't see why you couldn't (except for
| interactive forms, which is already being worked on [1]. The
| pdf-writer low-level backend seems to have already implemented
| support for form fields, so it seems like a matter of time
| until it is implemented in Typst).
|
| [1] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1765
| rendaw wrote:
| I believe you _can_ do those sorts of layouts in Typst (and
| Latex, and Sile!), but it 's about how far out of the way you
| have to go and how much you fight the system in the process.
| I don't see any examples of Typst doing anything other than
| papers, I believe for good reason.
|
| To be clear, I mean from a design perspective. Like take a
| print copy of Wired... how hard would it be to replicate any
| of those pages? Without using other software (aside from
| maybe cutting up stock photos). I can format scientific
| papers in HTML and it's not too hard, I can also format a
| cookbook, and it's not that hard. It's not great either!
| andy12_ wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think that it would be too hard. With the
| grid function you can do a lot of things, specially because
| you can use grid.cell(rowspan:3, colswap:4) to make cells
| that span multiple rows or columns, use fractional sizes
| for the columns (1fr, 2fr, etc), and add independent insets
| and strokes for each cell, so you can already do a lot of
| the things you can achieve with css flexbox.
|
| Though I suppose the docs could include tutorials for how
| to use them to make a more diverse kind of documents, and
| adding another layout function that behaves more like
| flexbox would be nice (though it wouldn't be too hard to
| create a function that re-creates the behaviour of flexbox
| based on the grid function).
| lblume wrote:
| I found it _much_ easier to use Typst to create any of
| these documents than any other software I used before. Just
| loading data from a JSON and incrementally regenerating the
| document on each change is game-changing for me.
| jamesmunns wrote:
| You definitely can, I designed a 206x85cm standing banner for
| my last trade show as one of the first "production" things I
| built in Typst:
|
| https://typst.app/project/r1YNDcKpoF1sVXHf5n4VKB
|
| Plus you can share the rendered and preview form of the
| project with a single link, which is pretty neat.
| fmoralesc wrote:
| You can use typst locally and bypass the commercial bits. It is
| really easy to create different kinds of documents with it. I
| have been using it to create slides and handouts, and for that
| I already find it much easier to use than the alternatives.
| grahameb wrote:
| Can you make slides and handouts from the same primary
| document? That'd save me an inordinate amount of time for
| some church use-cases.
| Onawa wrote:
| Look at Quarto. Markdown input, basically any output you
| want, including HTML, PDF, DOCX, PPTX, etc... All from the
| same input. Reuse text chunks, use variables, templates,
| and more. Then just run 'quarto render'.
| dvdkon wrote:
| My first "real" usecase for Typst was a poster [0], since it
| was much easier than doing it in LaTeX. It's missing some
| features, like wrapping around figures and flowing text between
| boxes, but TeX doesn't have the second either and both are
| planned in Typst.
|
| [0]: https://dvdkon.ggu.cz/projects/pppql/poster.pdf
| blindstitch wrote:
| Flowing text between boxes can be done with flowfram, which
| is old and clunky, but works OK.
| blacklion wrote:
| > Stuff like forms, invoices, flyers, handouts, leaflets,
| business cards -- an afterthought, at best.
|
| It is because you can typeset beautiful long text
| algorithmically and all these small forms like invoices and
| flyers are more graphical design than typesetting: you need to
| place many small elements precisely, not relative to each other
| but to the edges of the page / optical centers / etc. It is not
| very convenient without WYSIWYG. Possible, yes, but will
| require many trial-and-error when in WYSIWYG layout program can
| be done from first try.
|
| Think about tabloids too: text, which wraps around non-
| rectangualr images, cut-outs, etc. Hard to do without seeing
| what you do, only with text and coordinates.
|
| Edit: typo test - _text_.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I might be using Typst wrong, but it's like a visual
| programming environment. I guess I found my jsfiddle or other
| tools that other people use.
|
| It's very satisfying to play with visualizations in Typst,
| especially since it updates the output so fast (instant for
| small projects).
| xvfLJfx9 wrote:
| Interesting, but I wonder what does this offer that typst
| doesn't?
| Faelian2 wrote:
| That's a really interesting project.
|
| I have been generating documents for a while using
| https://github.com/enhuiz/eisvogel. It's nice to use markdown,
| but I feel really limited, and can't do much customization.
|
| I would love to see some templates for this.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't understand what this does that LaTeX does not, and though
| I haven't checked I suspect the inverse is not the case
|
| Is very slightly more concise syntax worth it?
| francislavoie wrote:
| Very cool, but CLI tools with a JVM language? :( I'd be much
| quicker to try this out with a static binary.
| codychan wrote:
| It was cool until I saw it needs gradlew to build and Java 17+
| to be installed.
| genewitch wrote:
| Hey, something other than Minecraft that requires Java > 16.
| Maybe just spigot and paperm.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I wonder how much control this gives you. For example, drop-caps,
| kerning, text flow around images, etc.
| cluckindan wrote:
| https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/blob/main/mock/textforma...
|
| https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/blob/main/mock/images.qm...
| davidpapermill wrote:
| "Very little" in terms of the text formatting I guess. But
| there's no reason they can't improve on that.
| freefrog334433 wrote:
| I've started using presenterm for markdown presentations. Given
| that markdown is just a format, a comprehensive comparison should
| find the tools using markdown to export to pdf and epub.
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| Do you know how it compares to marp? I've been using it last
| year and it's pretty nice. I hadn't heard about presenterm
| before.
|
| - https://marp.app/
| pedro_movai wrote:
| I made a similar project, but functions are made in js.
|
| https://github.com/pedroth/nabladown.js
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Looks kinda like restructuredtext, but with exactly half the dots
| and 100% more curly braces.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Which is where MyST [0] gets its structural cues. That's
| another alternative missing from the comparison table of this
| project, and an interesting one for how much it seems to be
| going for the science community that loves Jupyter notebooks.
|
| [0] https://mystmd.org/
| silvestrov wrote:
| .function {greet} .greet {world} from:{iamgio}
|
| I strongly suggest that the greet call uses a slightly different
| syntax (e.g. two dots) as the system otherwise can't introduce
| new keywords without risking conflict with function names in
| existing documents.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Does it need more keywords? This syntax reminds me of Smalltalk
| syntax a little and Smalltalk famously got away with merely 6
| keywords. I didn't check the syntax in detail for quarkdown,
| and I don't expect it to be as well thought out as Smalltalk,
| but it is quite possible to get away with only few keywords.
| Question is then how complete their concept is right now. Also
| there could be a versioning mechanism, that labels a document
| as for a specific version of Quarkdown.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| 64kb of ram is enough for anyone.
| maxloh wrote:
| A backward compatible design would be resolve to user-defined
| functions first, built-in keywords afterwards.
|
| That way any new keywords won't be a backward incompatible
| change.
| willvarfar wrote:
| if you have a UDF called .until and then this becomes a
| keyword, does the new 3rd party library you start using that
| uses the keyword .until still work, and what does the LLM
| vibe-coded start doing in the future when it makes use of the
| .until keyword?
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's a pretty bad design. You don't want users to be able
| to create functions named as keywords because it will break
| other code.
| SuperV1234 wrote:
| This is pretty cool! Could you compare your approach to the one
| taken in Majsdown?
|
| https://github.com/vittorioromeo/majsdown
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| Slightly related, but for forms: https://forms.md
| klez wrote:
| I can't seem to understand how their syntax is "markdown-like"
| in any way. All I see is some sort of declarative language
| surrounded by code.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Totally confused. Lost 10 minutes.
| akagusu wrote:
| It lost me here:
|
| > Java 17 or higher is required.
| klez wrote:
| Is this the usual anti-java sentiment or is there something in
| particular with java >= 17 that you have something against?
| benatkin wrote:
| It has obvious annoyances like these deeply nested paths:
|
| quarkdown-quarkdoc-reader/src/main/kotlin/com/quarkdown/quark
| doc/reader/dokka/DokkaHtmlContentExtractor.kt
|
| https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris.
| ..
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| Markdown, Quardown, Typst, this and that. This looks to LaTeX.
| All of this became so confusing and un-standardized - I went back
| to HTML+CSS.
| 360MustangScope wrote:
| Ah yes, writing my notes down in css and html. My favorite!
|
| Seriously though, every time some new hotness comes along, you
| don't really have to use it or even waste your time looking at
| it. Markdown will likely be here after all of its derivatives
| are long gone.
| sixtyj wrote:
| Gruber and Schwarz knew that in simplicity is a beauty.
|
| Basic markdown format is good enough.
|
| For specific cases, it depends what is the outcome - html,
| pdf...
|
| But hell are binary formats that are used for page layout -
| vendor lock for centuries. Backward compatibility? Forget
| about it.
|
| From this point of view people should stick to text based
| formats. Markdown, LaTex, Typst... you name it. Just use it
| :)
| maclong9 wrote:
| For me the only addition to markdown I usually enjoy is
| mathematical typesetting like on GitHub using the inline $$
| syntax or the code blocks with the language set to `math`
| setopt wrote:
| There's also the mature and reliable Org-mode, if you don't
| mind Emacs as an editor.
| blenderob wrote:
| Does org-mode have a spec? From what I've seen, org-mode is
| defined as whatever Emacs does. Without a spec I can't see
| how it's a viable format for widespread usage.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Org-mode has all three of:
|
| 1. Spec, written after the fact, not by a core dev.
|
| 2. Live help in 'org-info'.
|
| 3. Elisp string extraction via 'M-x describe-function' and
| the like.
|
| Difficulties arise from subtle inconsistencies between the
| three, and inability of any one to comprehend the kitchen-
| tool-bin jumble of low- and high-level functionality that
| has been added over the years.
|
| OTOH, content display is economical of eye and finger
| effort, and some of the Emacs interaction features
| startingly powerful.
|
| I wrote my own, use-case specific converter to expand org-
| format to HTML. Runs on the CL, written in Go.
| cycomanic wrote:
| There is a Neovim "fork" of org mode that defined a spec
| for their format (which differs somewhat from org mode
| though)
| eGQjxkKF6fif wrote:
| Same. Replacing elements in with DOM in webdev is surprisingly
| fun with websockets too.
|
| Having to know and learn 300 clunky frameworks, 97 different
| syntaxes it gets old.
|
| HTML. CSS. Javascript.
|
| Ask the AI to give me a markdown to html converter, good2go
| runarberg wrote:
| > Ask the AI to give me a markdown to html converter, good2go
|
| Why would you do that? There are dozens of libraries which do
| exactly that. Instead of AI you can ask npm or pip, heck you
| can even ask CRAN[1].
|
| 1:
| https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/markdown/index.html
| ozim wrote:
| Well basic markdown is super useful to do stuff quickly.
|
| Problem is when people started to build systems upon systems
| upon something that should not be used for more complicated
| cases.
|
| Maybe not a problem because I don't care but I just see how
| loads of things that someone created to be "just that" someone
| takes without understanding and builds on top instead of
| understanding limitations and scope of the initial idea or
| system.
|
| It is "oh it is missing a feature" - where it is "no it wasn't
| built to do that".
|
| I have seen notepad in windows shipping some formatting
| features, I don't see that as an improvement. Notepad was
| notepad for purpose.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think a good balance for a markdown syntax is something you
| can write nearly naturally on the fly (very low syntax needed
| for basic use) but can continue to mark up in more detail
| when you want to turn something into a complex use case (very
| high syntax ceiling for the complex cases). HTML+CSS almost
| gets there except the tags are a bit awkward for simple
| things like just <strong>bolding</strong> a word.
|
| Regarding Notepad, keep in mind they dumped an entire
| separate app (WordPad) by merging the ability to format into
| Notepad. This kind of mirrors what I was talking about above:
| one app with a very low floor but a flexibly high ceiling
| when you want to go there with it rather than two separate
| apps you need to pick from up front.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| You know what, while you're at it, I might as well bring it up.
| How about XML?
|
| I haven't really tried writing large pieces of text in it but I
| am already seriously considering. All other alternatives are
| too complicated and have a learning curve that gets in the way
| of writing itself. With XML, I'd be able to define my own tags
| and run them by a parser later on to auto-generate indexable
| footnotes, and create my own ways of structuring text besides
| the usual ones (chapters, sections, etcetera). Has anyone tried
| this approach?
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| Basically DocBook?
| drob518 wrote:
| Exactly. Seems like we already invented that but it didn't
| really catch fire.
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| Yeah last time I touched it was during an internship 15
| years ago, the few memories I recall were not enjoyment
| at all (however I was using LaTeX everywhere at the
| time).
|
| Writing documentation as XML is powerful but not
| enjoyable at all I guess
| andrewd18 wrote:
| Professional tech writer here: We use GitHub and a tool
| called OxygenXML to write docs-as-code in an XML DTD called
| "DITA". It's a hefty IBM invention from the early aughts, but
| it covers every use case I've thrown at it, from small
| documentation sets to multi-thousand-page monsters. Supports
| PDF, HTML, Word, and many other output types.
| starkparker wrote:
| DITA's so great at everything _except contributions from
| non-tech writers_ that half of my career has involved
| migrating tech writing stacks that use it to Markdown/SSGs
| in git repos.
|
| DITA's benefits require a certain scale that most tech
| companies never achieve. And the Open Toolkit is a
| nightmare piece of software.
| andrewd18 wrote:
| Agreed, and we use Markdown where we can. But inevitably
| some product manager comes along and demands tables
| inside tables or embedded reuse of content... and it's
| back to DITA.
|
| OxygenXML makes the OT much more manageable. I haven't
| had to touch an OT XSL transform in a few years now.
| Worth every penny.
| dgb23 wrote:
| There's also a standard to turn XML into HTML via XSLT.
| tempfile wrote:
| I have been thinking about this seriously myself. Not with a
| specific existing schema like DocBook, but with a custom
| schema (defined by me) that I then compile to standard
| schemas, like DocBook or HTML.
|
| This seems extensible to the degree that I want (i.e.
| semantically rich enough that you can conceivably hang any
| application from it). But I just can't bring myself to write
| in XML syntax, especially for maths.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| If 2005 text editors autocomplete made it easy to balance and
| indent html/xml tags and syntax highlighting like today, would
| JSON, Yaml, Markdown have taken off? In The Art of Unix
| Programming from 2003, the author states editing xml by hand is
| torture, hence we must invent unique text formats and parsers
| for the same.
| tempfile wrote:
| I have not been able to configure an editor that makes it
| less painful. I think it's not just the verbosity (although
| that is painful) - the prefix notation makes some things
| inherently hard to read. MathML is almost impossible.
| ekianjo wrote:
| No comparison with quarto given.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Very intriguing. I write my resume in a blend of LaTeX and
| Markdown, use Pandoc to convert the file to LaTeX, which then
| gets turned into a PDF. This might be a tidier solution on the
| front end, though I like my current flow because the maturity of
| all the tools means I can come back to my resume after several
| years and it'll still compile.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| oh no it's LaTeX with significant white space
|
| EDIT: I was just teasing, probably inappropriately my apologies.
| I use org-mode -> LaTeX for a similar markdown to article flow. I
| think it's a good idea and the results look nice.
| blenderob wrote:
| Is the comparison table accurate? -
| https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison
|
| Surely LaTeX has full scripting ability even though I wouldn't
| wish such a punishment on anyone.
|
| Surely Quarkdown's gibberish like syntax is not more concise and
| more readable than Typst?
|
| And surely the learning curve is not easier than Typst? I'd say
| the learning curve is more or less the same as Typst.
|
| Surely LaTeX can also produce HTML with tex4ht?
| flenserboy wrote:
| Pandoc is your friend for this and many other use cases.
| blenderob wrote:
| Not sure I understand. I never said anything about my use
| cases. I was checking the accuracy of the comparison table.
| Did you mean to post that comment here or were you replying
| to another comment?
| cAtte_ wrote:
| they were probably mentioning that, with pandoc, you can
| convert between HTML and PDF for any of these tools anyway
| blenderob wrote:
| Ah! Thanks. Yeah Pandoc is great for conversions to HTML
| and PDF. It's my no. 1 tool for writing docs and
| generating multiple formats out of the docs.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >And surely the learning curve is not easier than Typst?
|
| To be fair, (most) markdown is valid Quarkdown. Barrier to
| entry really doesnt get any lower than that. Of course the
| learning curve is not fully synonymous with the barrier to
| entry, but it's a significant part.
|
| And "learning curve" is really such a subjective quality. Kinda
| fucked from the start once you put it in a comparison table.
| Explicit features are more objective but even then sometimes
| products dont NEED certain features because of their design.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I mean one can take a quick look at what has been accomplished
| in TikZ and pgf to figure LaTeX and plain TeX's scripting
| ability.
|
| The comparison table is clearly inaccurate.
| tinthedev wrote:
| I'm not quite sure who this is for.
|
| Markdown is for keeping things simple.
|
| There's plenty of of "proper" markup languages and full
| programming languages to actually write code in.
|
| Why do we need a hybrid program like this, which is not as simple
| as pure markup, and is not as powerful as a proper templating
| language?
|
| I personally just run markdown -> HTML/CSS -> python templating
| (Jinja or something) -> PDF/HTML
|
| As a dev, I find this works the best for me. But I also cannot
| imagine that learning Quarkdown would improve my workflow
| meaningfully, and I also cannot imagine recommending someone
| learn such a niche product instead of having them learn HTML/CSS
| and Python (Jinja if they need fancy). Seems like a comparable
| amount of effort.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| its for people who want latex but are mad that latex became c++
| nailer wrote:
| LaTeX also has some bizarre defaults like bitmap fonts in a
| tool designed to allow people to create high quality typeset
| documents.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| which is ironic considering at one time the appeal of LaTeX
| was "sane defaults". Don't get me wrong. The default
| choices were really the best choice at some point in the
| past. They just no longer are.
| Akronymus wrote:
| And latex is one of very few programs where changing
| defaults would fundamentally undermine its very purpose
| (being able to recreate documents no matter how old)
| michal_h21 wrote:
| This was true maybe 20 years ago, before TeX engines that
| output directly to PDF were created. Today, the recommended
| engine is LuaLaTeX, and it defaults to OpenType fonts.
| nailer wrote:
| Thanks for updating me. That corresponds with my own
| timeline where I last tried it 20 years ago.
| WillAdams wrote:
| If one just chooses a reasonable documentclass and if need be
| a few packages suited to the requirements of one's document,
| then it all "just works" with (mostly) sensible defaults and
| minimal configuration.
|
| Memoir hugely simplified my own work in LaTeX back when I was
| doing book composition.
|
| Or, just use LyX....
| sureglymop wrote:
| Well, you'll have to install and keep those packages
| somewhere on your system. And maybe a few months from now
| after your latex distribution got updated by the system
| your document suddenly no longer compiles.
|
| What I want is something like npm-like package management
| for this, where the packages are just kept there next to
| the document. I don't care if I'll have a package 20 times
| on my system either, storage hasn't been a concern in many
| years.
| blenderob wrote:
| > And maybe a few months from now after your latex
| distribution got updated by the system your document
| suddenly no longer compiles.
|
| I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years. This has literally
| never happened to me. If that's not stability, I don't
| know what is. LaTeX documents I wrote in my grad days
| still compile for me. I just checked and it does. I do
| keep the dependency packages myself in my folder.
|
| Has this issue ever happened to anyone? Why would LaTeX
| distribution getting updated break my documents? It's
| still the same latex compiler and the same base styles
| and packages!
| WillAdams wrote:
| The only instance of a document not working right anymore
| for me was a really hacked book using an early/beta
| version of memoir --- there were (documented) breaking
| changes for the final release --- updated to match the
| new macro calls and it was back to working in short
| order.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years
|
| it gets annoying when you use LaTeX once a year for 25
| years.
| blenderob wrote:
| > when you use LaTeX once a year for 25 years
|
| That's me.
|
| Is there any specific issue you face which stops you from
| compiling old files?
|
| As I mentioned in my other comment, my grad school days
| documents are still compiling fine.
|
| If you still use LaTeX 2e and you've got all the
| dependency packages with you, pdflatex should Just Work.
| right? I can't remember any major change that would
| outright break your compilation. And I haven't seen such
| issue too myself. So I genuinely want to know what
| specific issues you or others face that wouldn't even let
| you compile your document.
| ylk wrote:
| Not trying to argue that this happens regularly, but some
| recent (last 6 months or so) minted update contained
| breaking changes.
| sureglymop wrote:
| It happened to me because I had to use the templates and
| document classes provided by my university, which
| themselves rely on a bunch of packages I wouldn't have
| installed myself.
|
| My next step was to just try doing the build in
| containers but I even ran into it there once because I
| accidentally pulled a newer image...
|
| But it's just anecdotally. Maybe I really was holding it
| all wrong.
| mighty_plant wrote:
| Maybe running Latex in a container would meet your
| requirements?
| FRidh wrote:
| Write a Nix expression to compile your document. That way
| you can be sure it keeps working. I did this long ago for
| my PhD thesis and other papers.
| WillAdams wrote:
| There's a package for that:
|
| https://ctan.org/pkg/collect?lang=en
| kylereeve wrote:
| > If one just chooses a reasonable documentclass and if
| need be a few packages suited to the requirements of one's
| document, then it all "just works" with (mostly) sensible
| defaults and minimal configuration.
|
| Ironically, very similar to the story with modern C++. If
| you use a limited subset it can "just work" but only if you
| are disciplined and don't have to mix in legacy code that's
| pre-C++11.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| look c++99 was a very cromulent c++ as well. oh lol just
| like the LaTeX story
| behnamoh wrote:
| when this tool has "FakeBold"[0] like Latex has, I'll make
| the switch.
|
| [0]:
| https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1
| kzrdude wrote:
| Is there something like that for Typst?
| tempfile wrote:
| What does that actually mean? The tweet is not very clear.
| Is it the bold in the header? What's special about it?
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| I'm assuming it's emboldening text by thickening up the
| strokes instead of using a (possibly non-existent) bold
| variant of the font?
| slashdave wrote:
| Became? When? I have latex documents written a couple decades
| ago that still render fine.
|
| What happens in 10 years to all the Quarkdown documents once
| this fad fades away?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| This is for academic and publication journals.
|
| Which is why you see Typst it's strongest competitor in the
| Comparison Chart.
| behnamoh wrote:
| as an academic I don't see myself using this because I don't
| see my co-authors using this.
| JoBrad wrote:
| Be the change you want to see in the world!
| behnamoh wrote:
| I'll wait until after tenure.
| cschmidt wrote:
| Every conference has their own required LaTeX style file that
| must be used. Unless there is an automated way to convert
| these exactly, I don't see how LaTeX alternatives can be
| used.
| SGML_ROCKSTAR wrote:
| Is LaTeX difficult to learn? An article stated something
| about how its syntax is inscrutable, from what memory will
| allow before the caffeine hits.
| Biganon wrote:
| It's hell. You usually use an existing layout and adapt
| it to your needs, but even that can be counter intuitive.
|
| Source : wrote my MLaw papers with it.
| tough wrote:
| What's the problem with making your own layouts? just the
| syntax?
| tough wrote:
| llms are great at handling syntax for you so you can
| focus on your work
|
| I never wrote latex before, but writing a simple PDF /
| scholarly article from code is pretty easy with current
| tools if you're a dev
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > writing a simple PDF / scholarly article from code is
| pretty easy with current tools
|
| I tripped over a lot of abandonware while looking for a
| free OSS HTML->PDF solution, recently. What do you
| recommend?
| tough wrote:
| I settled using latex with tectonic, you could always
| leverage playwright or similar for easy html -> print to
| pdf without any weird libs? (not great startup time, but
| you can batch many ops in one session)
|
| # justfile -- put in repo root set shell := ["bash",
| "-cu"] # one shell - predictable env, pipe-fail, etc.
|
| # Build a PDF once pdf: tectonic -X compile
| src-v0.1/main.tex --outdir target/pdf # or swap for typst
|
| # Clean artefacts clean: rm -rf target
|
| # Live-reload while writing watch: cargo watch -q -x
| 'just pdf'
|
| then i just split the paper in sections like react
| components but using tex
|
| main.tex
|
| \documentclass{article}
|
| \input{preamble}
|
| \begin{document} \maketitle
|
| \input{sections/abstract}
|
| \input{sections/introduction}
|
| \input{sections/syntax}
|
| \input{sections/evaluation}
|
| \input{sections/conclusion}
|
| \end{document}
| yannis wrote:
| Depends on the user. Basic LaTeX2e/LuaTeX can be learned
| over 5 days. Guru level like any programming language
| needs its 10K hours. There are people who have an
| aversion for backlashes. The main reason for the "\" is
| perhaps the only char that is not commonly found in
| texts. Others like ":" re very common in texts. When
| parsing LaTeX and behind it is Knuth's original TeX
| engine, the commands are swimming in a sea of text (as
| the Dragon book says).
| svara wrote:
| I think that might be true at some maths and computer
| science meetings but is unheard of in other scientific
| fields.
| tincholio wrote:
| It's the standard in most hard science fields. Also
| common in some humanities, too.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Can I ask which humanities?
|
| I'm probably showing my bias here, but I'm (respectfully)
| surprised that, say, poets would want to work in LaTeX :)
| yannis wrote:
| Linguistics and many of its subbranches. Historians,
| archaeologists and to be honest LaTeX is great for
| poetry.
| ossner wrote:
| CS strongly prefers LaTeX [0,1] while broader journals
| and conferences prefer MS Word over it [2,3]. As long as
| there is not a solid infrastructure for these other
| typesetting systems, I never saw the appeal. I think for
| internal company reports they do have their uses, but
| other than that, why not use the LaTeX or Word?
| Realistically any person wanting to submit a work will
| know how to work with either one or the other.
|
| I also don't see the need for journals and conferences to
| make a typst template for exactly these reasons. The
| templates will have to be community-made and then you
| still run the risk of having a paper rejected a year from
| now because the template is outdated.
|
| [0] https://conferences.miccai.org/2025/en/PAPER-
| SUBMISSION-GUID...
|
| [1] https://github.com/apoorvkh/cvpr-latex-template
|
| [2] https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/formatting-
| guide
|
| [3] https://www.science.org/content/page/science-
| information-aut...
| ubersketch wrote:
| This is a general argument against any sort of innovation
| in this field, which is absurd.
| bjornasm wrote:
| They should have added Quarto there imo.
| coliveira wrote:
| That's why these things don't go anywhere. If I need to write
| formatting details, it is better to use LaTeX which is a well-
| tested and stable language that will last for another 30 years.
| zero0529 wrote:
| Yet also incredible verbose and outdated
| coliveira wrote:
| Outdated means there is something better that is now used
| to substitute an old technology, which is not the case for
| Latex. Unfortunately, programmers tend to think "outdated"
| just means "was created more than 5 years ago"...
| N7lo4nl34akaoSN wrote:
| .
| behnamoh wrote:
| Plus, with Latex you can use LLMs as assistants and they do a
| great job thanks to so much Latex data they've seen in
| training.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| And at least I can be sure that any math expression can be
| written somehow in latex, no mater how bizarre.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >markdown -> HTML/CSS -> python templating (Jinja or something)
| -> PDF/HTML
|
| Uh...
|
| maybe thats why they just want markdown -> PDF/HTML
| tinthedev wrote:
| Well, but you don't have `markdown -> PDF/HTML`
|
| Also, if you don't need the python bits, you just skip Python
| :)
| andai wrote:
| It's for me, as far as I can tell! I like making PDFs.
|
| My ideas start in Obsidian (Markdown) and then I use pandoc and
| add a bunch of cursed inline LaTeX hacks to the Markdown for
| the final product.
|
| I guess cursed hacks are part of any workflow, but I am
| definitely going to check this out.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I personally just run markdown -> HTML/CSS -> python
| templating (Jinja or something) -> PDF/HTML
|
| Unix philosophy vs highly integrated vertical Microsoft style
| applications. One benefits users, the other, the vendor.
| beneboy wrote:
| Could definitely see using this for docs. We end up with HTML
| scattered through our markdown files whenever we need something
| beyond basic formatting, which is ugly. The ecosystem support
| is the real question though - Markdown works everywhere because
| it's been around forever.
| jamesgill wrote:
| Instead of bolting an engine onto a bicycle to travel long
| distances, why not just use a motorcycle?
| blenderob wrote:
| What's a good motorcycle for typesetting? Any recommendations?
| cAtte_ wrote:
| Typst!
| criddell wrote:
| Adobe InDesign.
| davidpapermill wrote:
| InDesign is awesome. Anyone designing a general purpose
| document language should spend a lot of time in InDesign
| first. LaTeX should not be your mental model.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| EasyWriter!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyWriter
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j7zD5ydpUo
| xnorswap wrote:
| Because muscle-memory is a powerful force, and it's a
| convenient universal input language.
|
| It's why after years of powershell I still reflexively reach
| for "ls" not "Get-ChildItem"
|
| ( "ls" is aliased by default to Get-ChildItem thankfully! )
|
| Markdown is familiar, easy to use, and very human readable and
| editable without fear of breaking a compilation step.
|
| Typesetting languages however, TeX, LaTex, postscript or the
| nightmare of the PDF spec, are not.
|
| If I send someone who doesn't know anything about a document
| markdown, then there's a good chance they'll be able to make
| simple edits in their favourite text editor and not screw
| things up.
|
| If I send someone HTML, they'll likely be able to do simple
| edits but there's greater risk of breaking elements or styling.
| Not as bad as with stricter languages, but still significantly
| more chance than with markdown annotations.
|
| If I send someone some TeX, they'll probably not know what to
| even do with it, they'll likely get confused and ask for a file
| format they can use.
|
| Reducing how many different languages we have to master is
| important, so I think it's great if there's a way to write
| everything in flavours of markdown.
|
| Write markdown everywhere, and let the backends compile to
| relevant outputs.
|
| In this instance, it's left perhaps a bit function-heavy so
| there's still larger "risk", but that's likely something that
| can be solved through templating.
|
| We have flavours of MD, for github issues, for typesetting, for
| stackoverflow questions. Slack and Discord have (limited) MD
| support. We can write blogs in MD through jekyll.
|
| MD is everywhere, it's a convenient universal input language.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| I've achieved something similar by passing markdown into
| handlebars/ejs first before converting it to html
| rcarmo wrote:
| I was a bit surprised to see Kotlin as the main language (I quite
| like it, but had to move away from JRE-based anything) I hope it
| can be built as a native binary...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There is kotlin native these days; so not impossible.
|
| Kotlin is kind of nice for this stuff; which is probably why
| they picked it. IMHO Kotlin is undervalued as a python
| replacement; it's pretty convenient for a lot of data
| processing stuff. And being able to use whatever Java libraries
| are around is also not a bad thing.
|
| Anyway since it is kotlin, you could use kts (the scripting
| support). You'd still need a jre and kotlin installed but it
| would make it easy to invoke from the command line and it would
| be able to pull in jar file dependencies straight from maven
| central. There might also be a possible path to build this
| thing via Graal and package it up as native. Another option is
| to package everything with docker and call it with a simple
| shell script. And finally, Kotlin has a native compiler as well
| but I assume there are too many jvm dependencies to be able to
| use that.
|
| So, there are a few options here to make using this more
| convenient.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I personally prefer the dotnet ecosystem so for me f# is the
| definitive python replacement.
|
| But I am digressing.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't like the idea of using programming languages for text
| formatting because it is unclear how to implement a GUI editor
| for such format.
|
| Also Markdown is pretty bad format, for example it doesn't even
| have a specification, lot of ambiguity etc. Avoid it.
| davidpapermill wrote:
| Agreed, it's about _imperative_ vs _declarative_ languages.
|
| The problem with languages like LaTeX etc. is they treat a
| document as a linear sequence of instructions: "write this
| text", "switch to justify right" etc. - I think that made sense
| when LaTeX was created, but publishing has come a long way and
| imperative thinking doesn't help.
|
| A declarative form of document is the way forward. HTML is
| -kind of- like that, but unfortunately the assumption that a
| document is a linear list of stuff is still in there. That's
| one reason it doesn't work well for print.
| worldsavior wrote:
| At this point just use Typst/Latex.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Can this compile to LaTeX?
| jinay wrote:
| Please add an llms.txt file! https://llmstxt.org/
|
| I'd love to see how far I can take this by giving it to an LLM
| and asking it to format for me with Quarkdown.
| coherentpony wrote:
| > Converting complex HTML pages with navigation, ads, and
| JavaScript into LLM-friendly plain text is both difficult and
| imprecise.
|
| Oh my god. It just occurred to me that LLMs may have a better
| experience "browsing the internet" than humans do.
|
| That is so tragically depressing.
| jinay wrote:
| Soon we'll start having a humans.txt format to account for
| this
|
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| tiagod wrote:
| On the other hand, the requirement of stuff like this and MCP
| for LLMs might just bring back open APIs and stuff like RSS
| back to the web at large!
| blueflow wrote:
| Give the functions two-letter names and you have looped back to
| 1970's roff.
| cbarrick wrote:
| This just looks like reStructuredText.
|
| Quarkdown: .somefunction {arg1} {arg2}
| Body argument
|
| rST: .. somefunction:: {arg1} {arg2}
| Body argument
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Any reason to not just use Pandoc? It's been 15 years since I ran
| into this problem, but even at that point Pandoc made it pretty
| easy to go from Markdown -> Latex and then render from Latex ->
| PDF. The benefit of this pipeline is that if I needed to fine
| tune any of the Latex there was flexibility to do so.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Not sure if I would be taunting the trademark lawyers of Quark
| Software like this, but you do you I guess.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Yeah I had similar thoughts, but the name's certainly clever -
| it made me grin!
| krick wrote:
| Since 70% of comments under each of these posts are always "why
| not LaTeX?!", I want to start by reaffirming: yes, I do want a
| modern Markdown-based typesetting system. There even is a place
| of several of them. It would be absolutely nice to replace LaTeX,
| simply because it's old trash with remarkably inconvenient
| syntax, so, yes, a system with full control over markup is
| desirable. And if it necessarily increases verbosity, then there
| absolutely is a place for something "just a touch more powerful
| than markdown".
|
| However, at a glance it doesn't strike me as what I was looking
| for. There aren't too many examples, but it seems like it leans
| heavier towards "just a touch more powerful than markdown" rather
| than to "replace LaTeX" (or Typst, for that matter). And for the
| first scenario to play out, it must be really seamless to use.
| This one doesn't seem to be.
|
| 1. Just to take care of the elephant in the room: JVM. Same as
| many others, I won't even bother installing it to try it out, so
| it doesn't help virality much.
|
| 2. I don't like the syntax. It needs to be as compatible with
| plain markdown as possible, and this one isn't quite. My main
| issue is with argument to a function being tabulated. It seems
| like it will lead to the whole document being tabulated. It is a
| natural for markdown-compatible add-ons to employ a
| code/monospace blocks, but ```plugin-name is a better way to do
| it, because it doesn't mean you have to reformat your whole
| document when you decide to step off from plain markdown.
|
| 3. Since a "better markdown" is something more suitable for
| something that starts as your personal notes (if you are
| specifically working on preparing a document for publishing,
| indeed you can just do it in LaTeX as well), I suppose it's only
| useful to an extent it is integrated into your notetaking app.
| Surely, there are still _some_ people who do it in Emacs or Vim,
| but even such a retrograde as myself eventually moved on to
| Obsidian. I want ways to control my document structure better
| inside my notetaking app with a potential ability to publish. But
| as a standalone thing, I 'm not sure why would I use it. At least
| Typst has a proprietary online editor. I suppose, that's also how
| nearly everyone uses it.
| deppep wrote:
| LaTeX is not "old trash". It's one of the best piece of
| software ever written. Just don't import bs in your document.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Pandoc should have been in the comparison table.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Interested in this! Recently wrote a thesis. Wanted to use
| markdown, but that had too many limitations.
|
| After learning and using LaTeX for a bit I got used to it, but
| the overall experience of setting it up and its usability leaves
| a lot of room for improvements. But on the other hand it's
| established in academic writing.
|
| Do hope to see something based on markdown be able to replace
| LaTeX in the future.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| With Emacs and AUCTeX and a few macros for tab completion I
| could generally transcribe a math lecture in real time. If
| you're using completion then the verbosity isn't a downside and
| in fact helps add structure for automation.
|
| The main drawback for writing something like a thesis is that
| LaTeX not great to outline in. I think for my thesis I ended up
| doing initial drafts in org-mode and exporting into LaTeX to
| view it.
|
| Then once the overall structure took shape I edited the LaTeX
| directly. Otherwise you end up having to embed LaTeX markup in
| your markdown doc because markdown is underspecified compared
| to TeX.
| Onawa wrote:
| Quarto is probably what you're looking for. It's what we've
| been using for scientific publications in gov science research
| labs the past couple of years. Can output to LaTeX and
| incorporate templates and such.
| Lammy wrote:
| > What could be mistaken for a planet is actually a quark or,
| more specifically, a down quark, an elementary particle that is a
| major constituent of matter: they give life to every complex
| structure we know of, while also being one of the lightest
| objects in existence.
|
| Cool project, but seems dangerous to use the word "Quark" in a
| publishing context RE: QuarkXPress:
|
| - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=90886976&caseSearchType=U...
|
| - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97009034&caseSearchType=U...
|
| (Why do they have two for the same word?)
| thangalin wrote:
| My FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], takes a similar approach:
| Markdown -> XHTML -> TeX -> PDF. The software architecture shows
| how you can have processor chains:
|
| https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/ima...
|
| I developed KeenWrite to help write a sci-fi novel where I can
| use variables for character names, places, etc. See the
| tutorials[2] for details.
|
| For anyone still using pandoc and shell scripts, my Typesetting
| Markdown[3] series describes building a script-based
| infrastructure for converting Markdown into PDF.
|
| [1]: https://keenwrite.com/
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCqe3A5dFg&t=15s
|
| [3]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-
| markdow...
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Looks amazing of course, but usually it is the nitty gritty
| details where the mess and headache begins. How can I be
| confident that this is a viable alternative to fully fledged and
| mature alternatives like LaTeX?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| So it's like Typst but easier to learn? Any other advantages?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Some things I would want to see in a typesetting system:
|
| - Having a typesetting quality and control like TeX does,
| including mathematical typesetting, although improvements could
| be made to that, too. (I think I would also like the syntax more
| like TeX has)
|
| - You can include PostScript codes within the document which can
| run during the typesetting process (rather than only during
| output), therefore allowing it to affect decisions of page
| breaks, etc, as well as allowing PostScript to draw diagrams and
| control text rendering. (I had written a PostScript program to
| load PK fonts, so that would make it possible to use PK fonts
| from TeX as well.)
|
| - Full support for non-Unicode text (without converting it
| internally to Unicode). (It is OK if it also supports Unicode as
| long as the code to support Unicode is avoided when not using it
| (in the entire document or in a part of it).)
| cAtte_ wrote:
| do you have some sort of ethical opposition to unicode?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think Unicode is messy and is not the best way to do i18n
| and m17n and l10n and a11y and many other things (although
| there are also problems with existing implementations that do
| not have to do with the character set, the character set is
| one of the problems), and I also think that it is not good to
| insist on using one character set for everything (especially
| if that character set is Unicode).
|
| UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-EBCDIC, etc are encodings of
| Unicode. EUC-JP is not an encoding of a subset of Unicode; it
| is an encoding of JIS, which is a different character set.
| The PC character set is not a subset of Unicode; it is the PC
| character set. Being able to be mapped to Unicode in some
| cases does not make it Unicode (nor does it mean that these
| mappings are necessarily "clean", but even if they are, that
| still wouldn't make non-Unicode character sets to be (subsets
| of, or even supersets of) Unicode).
| kortex wrote:
| So how does going back to multiple incompatible character
| sets help anything?
| petalmind wrote:
| What is "non-Unicode" text exactly?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Text that uses character sets other than Unicode.
| GZGavinZhao wrote:
| Typst gang, unite!
| looneysquash wrote:
| The sample outputs look nice!
|
| But I always hate it when a templating language grows function
| calls and all of that. Maybe it makes sense in this context, I'm
| not sure.
|
| But if you end up using it together with another language, maybe
| for server side rendering or some kind of document from data
| generation, you quickly realize that switching between the two
| languages wastes a lot of time, and the templating language is
| never as powerful as the "real" language. So I prefer JSX, or
| something like Javascript's tagged template literals. Something
| where you use a real programming language, but where the context
| of the document is understood, so you don't have to worry about
| escaping or XSS.
| Aloisius wrote:
| What's the rationale behind hand coded typesetting these days,
| besides the cost of desktop publishing software?
| infogulch wrote:
| I've recently started rewriting basic process documentation into
| markdown, which also needs to be printed with a simple header and
| footer. I found that rendering to html, adding pagedjs cdn, and
| adding a styled header & footer tags looks and prints great
| already.
|
| It's surprising how close html & css are to being a pretty good
| layout system.
| RollingRo11 wrote:
| I want to move on from LaTeX syntax as much as the next person
| (hard to read, etc.),
|
| But as a consumer/user, wouldn't a more uniform syntax (large
| adoption of Typst, etc) be preferable to having multiple
| different typesetting systems. I feel like the prevailing aspect
| of LaTeX is its universality?
|
| (Then again, who hates options).
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