The main idea in softcover is to use (a restricted subset of) LaTeX as the "main" representation, which then gets converted to html + MathJaX using tralics (a l

The main idea in softcover is to use (a restricted subset of) LaTeX as the "main" representation, which then gets converted to html + MathJaX using tralics (a latex-to-xml converter) and lots of custom pre-processing, and post-processing steps. The source code is quite readable. The end result is the following pipeline: .tex --> .html+MathJax --> .epub --> .mobi The "Softcover-flavored Markdown" is just an optional convenience to enable people who don't know LaTeX to use the system as follows: .md --> .tex --> .html+MathJax --> .epub --> .mobi The way I see the .md to .tex conversion is not that exciting, but the fact we finally have a civilized way to produce .epub/.mobi from .tex files is an amazing achievement. If you're working on books, I highly recommend checking out the softcover software stack.