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.
pugworthy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2001zhaozhao 37 minutes ago [-]
That's a good argument. However, Quarkdown is still a strict upgrade over typing latex directly or whatever, and you get more predictable results and better compatibility with LLM-assisted editing than with a GUI editor like Word.
giwook 2 hours ago [-]
Going to work on a Quarkdown with even more Superpowers and a seamless UI/UX so you don't need to remember all the odd new commands.
I shall call it Microsoft Word.
setopt 50 minutes ago [-]
Since it’s an upgrade of markdown, you should have called it "markup".
dtj1123 32 minutes ago [-]
This sounds to me like it might benefit from some sort of "hypertext" functionality to allow for easy linking of documents
pugworthy 2 hours ago [-]
See, that's the Markdown-Word spiral i was talking about...
amai 7 hours ago [-]
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.
revolvingthrow 3 hours ago [-]
I used (and will continue to use) most of those. Quick rules of thumb:
- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html
- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside
- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)
- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever
By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?
0x3444ac53 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?
kitchi 1 hours ago [-]
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.
leephillips 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
iamgioh 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR
t-kalinowski 2 hours ago [-]
Memories are failable :) Here is the PR you merged June of last year, changing the file extension from `.qmd` to `.qd` after a discussion about Quarto: https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90
iamgioh 1 hours ago [-]
Of course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)
thangalin 3 hours ago [-]
> a comparison of all these tools/markup languages
It can take a long time to draft such comparisons; I crafted one for my own Markdown editor, which uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX:
Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.
vova_hn2 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I would really like if people who introduce a new project to an already very crowded space would start the introduction with "Why MyCoolProject instead of X?" section.
dleeftink 2 hours ago [-]
- paged.js[0] heeds the slow crawl towards the CSS paged media module, eventually allowing some truly great page-setting DX out-of-the box which it currently polyfills.
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 …
leephillips 9 minutes ago [-]
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.)
amai 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.
netbioserror 4 hours ago [-]
I've produced a staggering variety of documents with Typst. Books, booklets, slides, cards, documentation, everything. In most cases I only need a minimum of custom styles and behaviors at the top, and very occasionally a whole styling module. Blows the rest of these tools out of the water full stop.
evanb 2 hours ago [-]
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.
incognito124 29 minutes ago [-]
Pure art
iamgioh 2 hours ago [-]
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.
maxloh 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
ASalazarMX 1 hours ago [-]
It strikes me as odd to add functions to a text format, given that even in GUI documents macros are usually avoided. Was Quarkdown designed for complex and repetitive documents?
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.
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.
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
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.
runningmike 7 hours ago [-]
Nice! But in the Comparison should be MyST - https://mystmd.org/ This is the new markdown standard to be….
stefanka 2 hours ago [-]
Myst with Sphinx is great. I miss strong LSP support though—or at least I didn’t manage to get it run in helix.
I built my blog with pydata-sphinx-theme and myst
dnlzro 7 hours ago [-]
Or even Typst (not an extension of Markdown, but it has very similar goals and use cases).
iamgioh 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not familiar with it. Feel free to update the table in a PR
FailMore 3 hours ago [-]
I really like the docs idea. I think it’s great to automatically render the side menu.
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
hirako2000 5 hours ago [-]
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.
spidermonkey23 7 hours ago [-]
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.
iamgioh 2 hours ago [-]
You can achieve any layout you want thanks to the .row, .column and .grid function. A built-in CV template library is planned for the next minor release (https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/issues/472)
brockferocious 2 hours ago [-]
I became a big LaTex fan (from my time studying Physics)... So glad to see people expanding on it. Nice work!
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.
s_suiindik 3 hours ago [-]
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podviaznikov 6 hours ago [-]
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
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.
threetonesun 4 hours ago [-]
The silly part is having n+1 Markdown standards that all end up rendering as HTML anyway. Personally if it's a plain text file sure, basic Markdown is fine, beyond that just give me some kind of rich text editor that stores as HTML and let me do whatever and not have to hand format a Markdown table.
4 hours ago [-]
wabstractions 1 hours ago [-]
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huflungdung 3 hours ago [-]
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Aeroi 4 hours ago [-]
how is it for converting streaming api responses from LLM's?
iamgioh 2 hours ago [-]
LLM's aren't too familiar with Quarkdown's extensions and functions yet. But handling base Markdown is definitely doable. Please keep me updated!
Rendered at 19:07:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
I shall call it Microsoft Word.
- 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.
- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html
- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside
- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)
- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever
By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?
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.
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/
It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.
https://djot.net/
It can take a long time to draft such comparisons; I crafted one for my own Markdown editor, which uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX:
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.
[0]: https://pagedjs.org
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.
Thank you for volunteering to field questions.
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.
[1]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/context/
[2]: https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/
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.
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.
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 `#`):
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").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
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.
I think we can have this as a plugin in https://voiden.md/
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