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Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

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Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#201

Post by blenderob »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #197
blenderob wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And maybe a few months from now after your latex distribution got updated by the system your document suddenly no longer compiles. I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years. This has literally never happened to me. If that's not stability, I don't know what is. LaTeX documents I wrote in my grad days still compile for me. I just checked and it does. I do keep the dependency packages myself in my folder. Has this issue ever…

> I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years it gets annoying when you use LaTeX once a year for 25 years.

> when you use LaTeX once a year for 25 years

That's me.

Is there any specific issue you face which stops you from compiling old files?

As I mentioned in my other comment, my grad school days documents are still compiling fine.

If you still use LaTeX 2e and you've got all the dependency packages with you, pdflatex should Just Work. right? I can't remember any major change that would outright break your compilation. And I haven't seen such issue too myself. So I genuinely want to know what specific issues you or others face that wouldn't even let you compile your document.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#202

Post by tiagod »

coherentpony wrote: post #150
jinay wrote: post #148

Please add an llms.txt file! https://llmstxt.org/ I'd love to see how far I can take this by giving it to an LLM and asking it to format for me with Quarkdown.

> Converting complex HTML pages with navigation, ads, and JavaScript into LLM-friendly plain text is both difficult and imprecise. Oh my god. It just occurred to me that LLMs may have a better experience “browsing the internet” than humans do. That is so tragically depressing.

On the other hand, the requirement of stuff like this and MCP for LLMs might just bring back open APIs and stuff like RSS back to the web at large!

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#203

Post by bryanhogan »

Interested in this! Recently wrote a thesis. Wanted to use markdown, but that had too many limitations.

After learning and using LaTeX for a bit I got used to it, but the overall experience of setting it up and its usability leaves a lot of room for improvements. But on the other hand it's established in academic writing.

Do hope to see something based on markdown be able to replace LaTeX in the future.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#204

Post by tempfile »

behnamoh wrote: post #144
throwawaymaths wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

when this tool has "FakeBold"[0] like Latex has, I'll make the switch. [0]: https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1

What does that actually mean? The tweet is not very clear. Is it the bold in the header? What's special about it?

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#205

Post by beneboy »

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…

Could definitely see using this for docs. We end up with HTML scattered through our markdown files whenever we need something beyond basic formatting, which is ugly. The ecosystem support is the real question though - Markdown works everywhere because it's been around forever.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#206

Post by davidpapermill »

schaefer wrote: post #172
davidpapermill wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I gave your splash page a look: no docs, no examples, no screenshots. Your "free trial" is behind a sign-up wall. and I left.

Thanks for the feedback. Yep - we've yet to update the website. It's a waitlist, we're not launched yet. Absolutely fair criticism. It'll be updated in the next few weeks!

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#207

Post by ants_everywhere »

bryanhogan wrote: post #203

Interested in this! Recently wrote a thesis. Wanted to use markdown, but that had too many limitations. After learning and using LaTeX for a bit I got used to it, but the overall experience of setting it up and its usability leaves a lot of room for improvements. But on the other hand it's established in academic writing. Do hope to see something based on markdown be able to replace LaTeX in the future.

With Emacs and AUCTeX and a few macros for tab completion I could generally transcribe a math lecture in real time. If you're using completion then the verbosity isn't a downside and in fact helps add structure for automation.

The main drawback for writing something like a thesis is that LaTeX not great to outline in. I think for my thesis I ended up doing initial drafts in org-mode and exporting into LaTeX to view it.

Then once the overall structure took shape I edited the LaTeX directly. Otherwise you end up having to embed LaTeX markup in your markdown doc because markdown is underspecified compared to TeX.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#208

Post by WillAdams »

sureglymop wrote: post #137
WillAdams wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Well, you'll have to install and keep those packages somewhere on your system. And maybe a few months from now after your latex distribution got updated by the system your document suddenly no longer compiles. What I want is something like npm-like package management for this, where the packages are just kept there next to the document. I don't care if I'll have a package 20 times on my system either, storage hasn't…

There's a package for that:

https://ctan.org/pkg/collect?lang=en

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#209

Post by hypertexthero »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #98
tecleandor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that the similarity of the names come from different places, and in this case might be a remembrance of QuarkXPress. It's convergent evolution! :D

People may not know it but at some point in the nineties you'd enter a bookstore and 95%+ of all the books and magazines were typeset using QuarkXPress. Then Adobe's InDesign showed up in 1999 and things began to change. FWIW I both wrote and typeset books myself (for a traditional publisher): I did most of them using QuarkXPress but I managed to sneak one I made with LaTeX (it was a hard sell to the publisher / prin…

QuarkXpress for typesetting, Photoshop for painting pixels, and Macromedia Freehand for turning scanned drawings into vector graphics.

Was still using these in the early 2000s. Good times.

https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/american-overseas-scho...

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#210

Post by everybodyknows »

tough wrote: post #191
SGML_ROCKSTAR wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

llms are great at handling syntax for you so you can focus on your work I never wrote latex before, but writing a simple PDF / scholarly article from code is pretty easy with current tools if you're a dev

> writing a simple PDF / scholarly article from code is pretty easy with current tools

I tripped over a lot of abandonware while looking for a free OSS HTML->PDF solution, recently. What do you recommend?

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