Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

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 bolding 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.

Instead of bolting an engine onto a bicycle to travel long distances, why not just use a motorcycle?

with that attitude we'll be stuck with latex forever. let a man cook.

LaTeX also has some bizarre defaults like bitmap fonts in a tool designed to allow people to create high quality typeset documents.

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.