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Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

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Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#121

Post by genewitch »

Timwi wrote: post #30
skrebbel wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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?

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#122

Post by genewitch »

speerer wrote: post #62
majkinetor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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 , 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.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#123

Post by dgb23 »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #91
AmazingTurtle wrote: post #72

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.

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…

There's also a standard to turn XML into HTML via XSLT.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#124

Post by runarberg »

eGQjxkKF6fif wrote: post #81
AmazingTurtle wrote: post #72

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.

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

> 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

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#125

Post by jillesvangurp »

rcarmo wrote: post #118

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...

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.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#127

Post by tiffanyh »

tinthedev wrote: post #102

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…

This is for academic and publication journals.

Which is why you see Typst it's strongest competitor in the Comparison Chart.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#128

Post by WillAdams »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #104
tinthedev wrote: post #102

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…

its for people who want latex but are mad that latex became c++

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....

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#129

Post by shark1 »

structural wrote: post #2

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.

It is mentioned now. Btw, it looks very similar to.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#130

Post by codedokode »

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.

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