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Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

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Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#61

Post by zelphirkalt »

eviks wrote: post #29
enriquto wrote: post #24

The comparison to LaTeX is a bit unfair... the latex code is much larger than it needs to, and does things that the quarkdown doesn't (like floating the figure in the page). Once you remove that, both versions look essentially equivalent and just as readable.

If the sea of backslashes and \begin/end and \includegraphics doesn't disappear, no, latex doesn't look equivalent

The words "begin" and "end" are very readable, actually. "includegraphics" as well. Remains the aversion against backslashes. What exactly do you find less readable about them than other symbols like for example the colons or braces in Quarkdown? Or is it about the number of backslashes?

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#62

Post by speerer »

majkinetor wrote: post #7
speerer wrote: post #4

I'm very excited to boot up and try this. I may have finally found what I need to replace my rickety pipeline of templates and pandoc conversions.

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.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#63

Post by maxloh »

silvestrov wrote: post #54

.function {greet} .greet {world} from:{iamgio} I strongly suggest that the greet call uses a slightly different syntax (e.g. two dots) as the system otherwise can't introduce new keywords without risking conflict with function names in existing documents.

A backward compatible design would be resolve to user-defined functions first, built-in keywords afterwards.

That way any new keywords won't be a backward incompatible change.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#65

Post by skwee357 »

skwee357 wrote: post #18

This looks very interesting and more approachable than Typst. As some who uses headless chrome to turn html into pdf (for invoices), I have been looking for something simpler and faster. I tried typst, but it felt messy to me. I wonder if quarkdown offers more streamlined experience

Had a chance to read the wiki/docs deeper. Quarkdown seems to use puppeteer and chrome-print-to-pdf to generate PDF from HTML [1].

So, aside from the more minimal format or Markdown compared to HTML, I don't see much appeal in quarkdown compared to feeding HTML to a headless chrome instance.

But it is a cool project if one wants to turn a bunch of markdown files to say a book or an article.

[1] https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/wiki/pdf-export

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#66

Post by eviks »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #61
eviks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the sea of backslashes and \begin/end and \includegraphics doesn't disappear, no, latex doesn't look equivalent

The words "begin" and "end" are very readable, actually. "includegraphics" as well. Remains the aversion against backslashes. What exactly do you find less readable about them than other symbols like for example the colons or braces in Quarkdown? Or is it about the number of backslashes?

Actually, no, if markup takes more space than content, it hurts readability of the content. Especially for such common stuff like images.

But if you don't see this obvious barrier, I will unlikely be able to explain the issue with backslashes: it's partially about the number, but also visibility - .period syntax is a smart choice as it's unobtrusive and not part of the regular syntax, and it's more ergonomic to type, so a universal win.

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#67

Post by andy12_ »

rendaw wrote: post #52
andy12_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason why you can't use Typst for any of the stuff you mentioned? I can't see why you couldn't (except for interactive forms, which is already being worked on [1]. The pdf-writer low-level backend seems to have already implemented support for form fields, so it seems like a matter of time until it is implemented in Typst). [1] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1765

I believe you can do those sorts of layouts in Typst (and Latex, and Sile!), but it's about how far out of the way you have to go and how much you fight the system in the process. I don't see any examples of Typst doing anything other than papers, I believe for good reason. To be clear, I mean from a design perspective. Like take a print copy of Wired... how hard would it be to replicate any of those pages? Without u…

Honestly, I don't think that it would be too hard. With the grid function you can do a lot of things, specially because you can use grid.cell(rowspan:3, colswap:4) to make cells that span multiple rows or columns, use fractional sizes for the columns (1fr, 2fr, etc), and add independent insets and strokes for each cell, so you can already do a lot of the things you can achieve with css flexbox.

Though I suppose the docs could include tutorials for how to use them to make a more diverse kind of documents, and adding another layout function that behaves more like flexbox would be nice (though it wouldn't be too hard to create a function that re-creates the behaviour of flexbox based on the grid function).

Re: Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

#70

Post by cluckindan »

bovermyer wrote: post #38

I wonder how much control this gives you. For example, drop-caps, kerning, text flow around images, etc.

https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/blob/main/mock/textforma...

https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/blob/main/mock/images.qm...

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