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Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

quarkdown.com

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Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#141

Post by amai »

thangalin wrote: post #23
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.

oh, wow. That must have been a lot of work.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#142

Post by iamgioh »

bloppe wrote: post #109

My quick take: this is basically just Markdown with LaTeX-style macros, except they're called functions, presumably because at least 1 of them has side effects (the one that defines new functions). I appreciate the syntactic purity of "everything is a function", but the casual integration of structure (html) and styling (css) smells a bit off, but I suppose that line was already blurry anyway. This is cool. I think y…

Quarkdown uses actual functions that return values, they aren't macros. As for source readability, it's possible to define functions in a separate .qd file and import it via .include {myfile.qd}

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#143

Post by iamgioh »

timz wrote: post #113

Seems amazing, but more demos/examples would be nice, and installation instructions right on the homepage. Web editor would be great. Seems to be written for jvm :( The language spec is amazing and styling is slick.

Thanks! Installation instructions are on the homepage indeed

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#144

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

kwsp wrote: post #119
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who types latex directly anymore these days?

I just typed my entire PhD thesis in latex earlier this year

Why did you not have an LLM typeset it for you in 1% of the time that it took for you to type all of it out by hand? Did you ride a horse to university instead of taking your car as well?

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#145

Post by maleldil »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #144
kwsp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just typed my entire PhD thesis in latex earlier this year

Why did you not have an LLM typeset it for you in 1% of the time that it took for you to type all of it out by hand? Did you ride a horse to university instead of taking your car as well?

Are you suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses? Or just writing LaTeX commands while the students write the core text? Because if it's the latter, LaTeX usually isn't the bottleneck.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#146

Post by maleldil »

nextaccountic wrote: post #132
revolvingthrow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't care about missing features, but I just want a way to export to latex using typst. It's okay if this is not the day to day tool used to render, but this should be possible. It's just a compiler between two languages, and latex happens to be Turing complete (and can display arbitrary things to a PDF), so it's 100% in the "not impossible" category With such a tool nobody has to know if you use typst personally.…

Can't pandoc do it?

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#147

Post by lametti »

nextaccountic wrote: post #132
revolvingthrow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't care about missing features, but I just want a way to export to latex using typst. It's okay if this is not the day to day tool used to render, but this should be possible. It's just a compiler between two languages, and latex happens to be Turing complete (and can display arbitrary things to a PDF), so it's 100% in the "not impossible" category With such a tool nobody has to know if you use typst personally.…

I've submitted to a scientific journal using "typst to tex" [0].

It's definitely not perfect but it was good enough. And there is pandoc too.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/TheZoq2/ttt

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#148

Post by angiolillo »

nzoschke wrote: post #10
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.

Consider djot for the comparison list too. It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown. https://djot.net/

It is an interesting project. I would love to see markdown improved and I agree with many of the simplifications they've made.

However I'm skeptical that any format that compromises the editing experience will gain traction with users. For example, djot requires a blank line before nested lists (at least in the default mode) which requires writing lists in a way that I've never seen anyone write in an email because it groups nested items incorrectly in the raw text.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#149

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

maleldil wrote: post #145
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you not have an LLM typeset it for you in 1% of the time that it took for you to type all of it out by hand? Did you ride a horse to university instead of taking your car as well?

Are you suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses? Or just writing LaTeX commands while the students write the core text? Because if it's the latter, LaTeX usually isn't the bottleneck.

No, I am not suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses. The original poster implied that they typed latex code for their thesis out by hand, to which I responded that it seemed silly to do so, silly in a similar way that taking a horse drawn carriage would be vs using a car.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#150

Post by antiframe »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #149
maleldil wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses? Or just writing LaTeX commands while the students write the core text? Because if it's the latter, LaTeX usually isn't the bottleneck.

No, I am not suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses. The original poster implied that they typed latex code for their thesis out by hand, to which I responded that it seemed silly to do so, silly in a similar way that taking a horse drawn carriage would be vs using a car.

So, do they write their formulas like S a b f(x)dx in their hand-written source text, but then get the LLM to convert that to \int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx? Invent their own "markup" to indicate S a b is the integral from a to b? They might as well learn \int and just use that.

I write LaTeX by hand all the time whenever I need to put any math in my notes, and depending on your use-case or field, you learn the LaTeX for that which you use often and it's faster than trying to use most tools.

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