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Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

quarkdown.com

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Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#21

Post by revolvingthrow »

amai wrote: post #5

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages: - MyST - Pandoc - Quarkdown - Quarto - Typst Quarto and pandoc both use Pandoc Markdown (and so does https://www.zettlr.com/ ). But Quarkdown and Typst offer programmable markup languages like LaTeX (or HTML + Javascript). It seems the winner for the title official LaTeX successor is still not decided.

I used (and will continue to use) most of those. Quick rules of thumb:

- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html

- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside

- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)

- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever

By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#22

Post by FailMore »

I really like the docs idea. I think it’s great to automatically render the side menu.

The prevalence of Markdown from agents made me work on something similar too. My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) was on the /show page a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).

Sdocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web

I like the fact it doesn’t require you to install anything to get a great experience.

Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):

  https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").

The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.

This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.

I’m working on a few new features at the moment:

1. Commenting (so you can easily comment on a markdown file and feed that back to your agent)

2. A powerful slides functionality

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#23

Post by thangalin »

amai wrote: post #5

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages: - MyST - Pandoc - Quarkdown - Quarto - Typst Quarto and pandoc both use Pandoc Markdown (and so does https://www.zettlr.com/ ). But Quarkdown and Typst offer programmable markup languages like LaTeX (or HTML + Javascript). It seems the winner for the title official LaTeX successor is still not decided.

> a comparison of all these tools/markup languages

It can take a long time to draft such comparisons; I crafted one for my own Markdown editor, which uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX:

https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/

Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#25

Post by nine_k »

As an SSG user, I prefer the cleanest markdown as input, and putting all the formatting details into the CSS. E.g. I don't need `.abstract`, the CSS will format the first paragraph as an abstract without me asking explicitly.

OTOH I see this as a way to produce more rich self-contained documents. There's no CSS, but there's a bunch of predefined styling options. I can't help but see the early HTML in it. HTML 1 did not have colors and barely any formatting, comparable to Markdown. HTML 3 had stuff already like , etc.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#26

Post by dleeftink »

amai wrote: post #5

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages: - MyST - Pandoc - Quarkdown - Quarto - Typst Quarto and pandoc both use Pandoc Markdown (and so does https://www.zettlr.com/ ). But Quarkdown and Typst offer programmable markup languages like LaTeX (or HTML + Javascript). It seems the winner for the title official LaTeX successor is still not decided.

- paged.js[0] heeds the slow crawl towards the CSS paged media module, eventually allowing some truly great page-setting DX out-of-the box which it currently polyfills.

[0]: https://pagedjs.org

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#28

Post by 0x3444ac53 »

revolvingthrow wrote: post #21
amai wrote: post #5

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages: - MyST - Pandoc - Quarkdown - Quarto - Typst Quarto and pandoc both use Pandoc Markdown (and so does https://www.zettlr.com/ ). But Quarkdown and Typst offer programmable markup languages like LaTeX (or HTML + Javascript). It seems the winner for the title official LaTeX successor is still not decided.

I used (and will continue to use) most of those. Quick rules of thumb: - markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html - quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside - typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst) - pandoc is how you…

I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#29

Post by pugworthy »

I guess yea I'm impressed, but to me the whole point of Markdown is that it's dirt simple. You can edit it and use it without any kind of GUI and have a pretty good idea what you are going to get. You can create it in VIM in a terminal, and trust what you did is going to look fine. Heck you can just look at the raw .md file and read it just fine.

But then you start adding to it. Soon you find yourself looking up all the odd new commands. And wishing for a WYSIWYG editor because you can't remember the commands or not sure what it will look like without the live render.

It's a bit like saying, "Hey this QWERTY keyboard is nice, but what if it had keys for all the Cyrillic, Devanagari, Chinese, and Arabic characters too? Wouldn't that be great?" Well, yea. But you just put the hunt back in hunt and peck.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#30

Post by vova_hn2 »

amai wrote: post #5

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages: - MyST - Pandoc - Quarkdown - Quarto - Typst Quarto and pandoc both use Pandoc Markdown (and so does https://www.zettlr.com/ ). But Quarkdown and Typst offer programmable markup languages like LaTeX (or HTML + Javascript). It seems the winner for the title official LaTeX successor is still not decided.

Yeah, I would really like if people who introduce a new project to an already very crowded space would start the introduction with "Why MyCoolProject instead of X?" section.
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