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Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

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Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#151

Post by starkparker »

andrewd18 wrote: post #100
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#153

Post by davidpapermill »

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…

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Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#154

Post by SGML_ROCKSTAR »

cschmidt wrote: post #149
tiffanyh wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is for academic and publication journals. Which is why you see Typst it's strongest competitor in the Comparison Chart.

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.

Is LaTeX difficult to learn? An article stated something about how its syntax is inscrutable, from what memory will allow before the caffeine hits.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#156

Post by riskassessment »

jsilence wrote: post #32
account-5 wrote: post #5

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/

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...

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).

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#157

Post by davidpapermill »

rendaw wrote: post #25

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 app…

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Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#158

Post by svara »

cschmidt wrote: post #149
tiffanyh wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is for academic and publication journals. Which is why you see Typst it's strongest competitor in the Comparison Chart.

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.

I think that might be true at some maths and computer science meetings but is unheard of in other scientific fields.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#159

Post by davidpapermill »

codedokode wrote: post #130

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.

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.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#160

Post by yowlingcat »

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.
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