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Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

quarkdown.com

51–60 of 151 posts

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#51
post #37

By the Standard Model of Physics Software you can edit Quarkdown in Atom to get Quarkup and change your Neutron Mail to Proton Mail, but it only works if you type with your left hand and create an Electron app and an anti-Neutrinos AI blogpost.

Pure art

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#52
So this is actually competing in the typesetting space, likely with Typst. Both aim to become a simpler alternative to LaTeX without that pain in the ass.

I think they are missing an opportunity to fix a poor design decision in Markdown. Instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_. That extra asterisk really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet. I hope they fix that in v3.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#53
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?

No issues per se, but academic publishing has deep roots in the latex ecosystem. So templates from publishers are often not available in typst, or the publisher insists on a latex formatted file. Often supervisors/professors etc will also resist using typst because of the cognitive overhead on their already oversubscribed time. Typst has about 40 years of history to overcome and that will take a long time to do.

Everything you say is true, although Typst is making slow headway¹.

Also, it’s possible, using some Pandoc magic², to enjoy aspects of Typst markup while generating a LaTeX document.

1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

2 https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#54
post #31

Quarkdown author and project lead here. I started Quarkdown as a uni research project and couldn't imagine what it would end up being 2 years later. Thanks for engaging! I'll try and respond to your comments.

Would you consider "fixing" the bold syntax on v3?

I have always believed that instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_.

That extra asterisk is a poor design decision in markdown. It really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#55
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.

I am currently enjoying WYSIWYG with GNU TeXmacs for long-form or scientific text editing. Both, the concept and the tool, are amazingly capable and a breath of fresh air after all the LaTex, Markdown, Org s …

Almost nobody uses TeXmacs it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#56
Quarkdown is a step in the right direction. One step closer to HTML.

Tough call. I think Markdown is not an authoring tool at all. In fact if you read through the changelog of GitHub Markdown, you will read a very detailed critique of the shortcomings of MD.

It isn’t a specification. This is MD’s biggest weakness as well as strength.

## can be a subheading or heading level 2.

How about an empty line between paragraphs or after headlines?

After reading this I consider MD an idea. A fantastic idea but not a spec.

Re: Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

#60
I having a proofreading project and have been storing structured text using an s-expr serialization of XML. But MD is just so convenient that I decided that starting from scratch and building around the idea made sense. I considered typst for a while but... while it is a good intermediate format if you want to produce PDFs, it is not a good and permanent storage format. Even looked at quarkdown I believe. Same opinion.

So I came up with a mini markup language built around directives and fenced blocks. A simple template import allows MD semantics (the stuff I care about) in the project. The idea is that the core is stable. You simply write schema validators for your schema and transformers for the output format. Probably 2-300 lines of python all-in-all for a "book+chapters" schema with an html transformer.

I did not fall into the trap of implementing a Turing complete programming language in it like so many other systems. If you want behavior, piggyback on directives and write a python transformer to manipulate the AST.

I got interested in something else soon after, so it will probably be a few more months till I have the time and the inclination to finalize and publish everything.

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