alt Hacker NewsQuarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
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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.
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.
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 you'll find a lot of skepticism here for anything that tries to significantly alter markdown. I understand some of the criticism that functions can degrade source readability if overused. Sometimes Turing incompleteness is a virtue. But as far as adding functions to markdown goes, this is probably among the cleanest designs out there.
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.
On a quick read of the docs I'm a bit worried Quarkdown doesn't have the right evaluation model for the job. Text layout typically iterates to a fixed point, because adjusting the layout of one part of the document can throw out layout at another part, require another layout pass and so on. Typst has the concept of context[1] for this. I didn't see anything in Quarkdown that seemed similar, though perhaps I missed it.
I switched from pandoc / md / LaTex to Typst for my book[2], and have been very happy with it. Programming in a modern language is nice, and Typst is much faster than pandoc + LaTex.
For my app, I chose a slightly different approach, focusing on readability and easy handling of large Mermaid diagrams. For example, I recently added a full-screen mode with map-like navigation: https://mdview.io/s/97af684b
Cool. The biggest question for me is: Why not LaTex or org-modes?
Tex is the superior typesetting, and since the advent of LLMs getting things done in Tex became a breeze.
Org-mode is the superior universal markup for, well everything, only downside is the default editor.
Nice! But in the Comparison should be MyST - https://mystmd.org/ This is the new markdown standard to be….
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.
As an SSG user, I prefer the cleanest markdown as input, and putting all the formatting details into the CSS. E.g. I don't need `.abstract`, the CSS will format the first paragraph as an abstract without me asking explicitly.
OTOH I see this as a way to produce more rich self-contained documents. There's no CSS, but there's a bunch of predefined styling options. I can't help but see the early HTML in it. HTML 1 did not have colors and barely any formatting, comparable to Markdown. HTML 3 had stuff already like <center>, etc.
It breaks the whole idea of Markdown - to be as natural as possible. This is like markdown with CSS Slap in , such a disgrace. It is not simple and as ugly as CSS.
It's nice in that it extends markdown rather than reinventing a different syntax.
But the point of markdown, is to simply, markdown. Everything beyond that is deemed superfluous and cumbersome as it would defeat the point. Just write things down.
It's the right balance between plain text and latex and the rest.
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.
I really like the docs idea. I think it’s great to automatically render the side menu.
The prevalence of Markdown from agents made me work on something similar too. My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) was on the /show page a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
Sdocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web
I like the fact it doesn’t require you to install anything to get a great experience.
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...
The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.
This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.
I’m working on a few new features at the moment:
1. Commenting (so you can easily comment on a markdown file and feed that back to your agent)
2. A powerful slides functionality
Been using Typst recently and really like it compared to LaTex. Pretty nice way to write things out and kinda like markdown in some ways but completely different in others. In my mind it's like a Markdown LaTex hybrid.
I was looking for something like this, but would love if it had CV formatted doc. I just want something easy to update, but easier to version control Vs docx.
I really hate it when the recommended install method is curl-ing some script directly into a shell, often as root. Especially since it's pretty well known that the remote end can tell whether it's going to a script or a file.
Quarkdown's page has this:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/quarkdown-labs/get-quarkdo... | sudo env "PATH=$PATH" bash
And… yuck. And that ".sh" is kind of annoying all by itself.
After looking at it for 1 minute, it seems that this is to markdown what CSS is to HTML.
How accurate is that?
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.
How does it replace Obsidian though? I somehow think the author does not fully understand that knowledge management systems are inherently interactive and need to handle queries like in databases because they are databases.
According to the wiki, Quarkdown supports cross-references in the same document, but not cross-references across many documents.
Or just use Asciidoc...
If it were simple and easy to remember complex plaintext syntax, we'd all be using LaTeX to do things. Unfortuantely, thats not true. Personally, I even switch away from rst to md. Took me a while to realize, but md is easier to remember / less magic.
I don’t think adding things to markdown is a good way to go. Markdown is just a poor language, period. Alternatives like Asciidoc make much more sense IMHO.
Wow I love this !
I think we can have this as a plugin in https://voiden.md/
demos look super clean!
I try to support multiple formats on my app: typst, mdx, marp, reveal, latex.
i think it should be possible to add support for quark down too
https://sublimated.com/docs/typst https://sublimated.com/docs/typst/demo/article.typ
Looks nice, but also the website is really nicely done. How did you make the animations?
I became a big LaTex fan (from my time studying Physics)... So glad to see people expanding on it. Nice work!
Soooo, Typst?
Before you know it we'll have re-invented LaTeX for a new generation.
This could also be a cool export/exchange format for Google Docs and the like.
The nice thing is that with LLMs using markdown we are getting a nice ecosystem for a universal method for communicating textual information. The negative is that Markdown is starting to look like the https://xkcd.com/927/ cartoon.
maybe I'm being dense, but why do people keep reinventing markdown to make it more like HTML when HTML exists?
Any AppImages planned for the future?
Another markup language that looks like RUNOFF from the 1970s. I used to use RUNOFF for my term papers.
Org.
Org is what you're looking for. Org Mode in Emacs, and all the org-* packages that make it so unbelievably useful. LaTeX integration, task management, scheduling, word processing, embedded images (if you must)... Org.
Wait, we created the unholy unity of troff and markdown?
Kidding aside, that kind of misses the point of either.
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how is it for converting streaming api responses from LLM's?
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.
I guess yea I'm impressed, but to me the whole point of Markdown is that it's dirt simple. You can edit it and use it without any kind of GUI and have a pretty good idea what you are going to get. You can create it in VIM in a terminal, and trust what you did is going to look fine. Heck you can just look at the raw .md file and read it just fine.
But then you start adding to it. Soon you find yourself looking up all the odd new commands. And wishing for a WYSIWYG editor because you can't remember the commands or not sure what it will look like without the live render.
It's a bit like saying, "Hey this QWERTY keyboard is nice, but what if it had keys for all the Cyrillic, Devanagari, Chinese, and Arabic characters too? Wouldn't that be great?" Well, yea. But you just put the hunt back in hunt and peck.