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Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
- spidermonkey23 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoYou 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 https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/issues/472)
- runningmike 6mo agoNice! But in the Comparison should be MyST - https://mystmd.org/ https://mystmd.org/ This is the new markdown standard to be….
- dnlzro 6mo agoOr even Typst (not an extension of Markdown, but it has very similar goals and use cases).
- iamgioh 6mo agoI'm not familiar with it. Feel free to update the table in a PR
- stefanka 6mo agoMyst 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
- amai 6mo agoI 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/ 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.
- ahofmann 6mo agoYou mean like this? https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison
- flexagoon 6mo agoThat doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
- iamgioh 6mo agoI'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR
- t-kalinowski 6mo agoMemories 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 https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90
- iamgioh 6mo agoOf course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)
- nzoschke 6mo agoConsider djot for the comparison list too. It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown. https://djot.net/ https://djot.net/
- angiolillo 6mo agoIt is an interesting project. I would love to see markdown improved and I agree with many of the simplifications they've made. However I'm skeptical that any format that compromises the editing experience will gain traction with users. For example, djot requires a blank line before nested lists (at least in the default mode) which requires writing lists in a way that I've never seen anyone write in an email because it groups nested items incorrectly in the raw text.
- noelwelsh 6mo agoOn 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. [1]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/context/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/context/ [2]: https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/ https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/
- podviaznikov 6mo agodemos 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 https://sublimated.com/docs/typst/demo/article.typ https://sublimated.com/docs/typst/demo/article.typ
- hirako2000 6mo agoIt'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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- sputknick 6mo agoThe 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/ https://xkcd.com/927/ cartoon.
- threetonesun 6mo agoThe 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.
- Aeroi 6mo agohow is it for converting streaming api responses from LLM's?
- iamgioh 6mo agoLLM's aren't too familiar with Quarkdown's extensions and functions yet. But handling base Markdown is definitely doable. Please keep me updated!
- Syzygies 6mo agoLLM's are an extension of us. We sometimes have to work to learn something new; so do LLM's. It's all in how we manage that process. Reifying information is the whole ball of wax, what separates different people's success rates using AI. AI is more surfboard than self-driving car; you don't just tell it which way to go. I still can't get AI to code well in Lean 4, but I'm writing a parser for a language that doesn't exist. AI understands the language as well as I do.
- Aeroi 6mo agowhy did my question get downvoted twice? I'm looking for markdown renders that can take llm output to beautiful markdown format?
- frizlab 6mo agoI 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 6mo ago[dead]
- FailMore 6mo agoI 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 https://sdocs.dev) was on the /show page a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633 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 url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F 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
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- nine_k 6mo agoAs 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dhruv3006 6mo agoWow I love this ! I think we can have this as a plugin in https://voiden.md/ https://voiden.md/
- iamgioh 6mo agoThank you!
- pugworthy 6mo agoI 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.
- giwook 6mo agoGoing 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.
- pugworthy 6mo agoSee, that's the Markdown-Word spiral i was talking about...
- setopt 6mo agoSince it’s an upgrade of markdown, you should have called it "markup".
- dtj1123 6mo agoThis sounds to me like it might benefit from some sort of "hypertext" functionality to allow for easy linking of documents
- solid_fuel 6mo agoNow you're cooking with gas. Maybe it could be some sort of semantic markup language so we can separate and annotate things like titles, headers, links, and all of that stuff.
- iamgioh 6mo agoQuarkdown 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.
- tasuki 6mo agoI read https://iamgio.eu/2025-12-10-accidentally-in-silicon-valley/ https://iamgio.eu/2025-12-10-accidentally-in-silicon-valley/ and it appears it worked out well – I'm happy for you!
- iamgioh 6mo agoThank you! This project is giving me so much fulfillment
- ASalazarMX 6mo agoIt 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? Thank you for volunteering to field questions.
- iamgioh 6mo agoQuarkdown was designed for control. Simple Markdown to define content, functions (LaTeX-style, but not macros!) for a declarative approach to document format and styling. Scripting came out naturally, so why not. Since v2 QD comes with a permission system that makes things safer.
- drfloyd51 6mo ago> why not? I wonder. > Since v2 QD comes with a permission system that makes things safer. That’s why not. You got your JavaScript in my HTML. Seriously though… it might be a useful feature. Or it could kill your product’s focus. Sincerely, good luck.
- 6mo ago
- brockferocious 6mo agoI became a big LaTex fan (from my time studying Physics)... So glad to see people expanding on it. Nice work!
- iamgioh 6mo agoThanks!
- evanb 6mo agoBy 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 6mo agoPure art
- iamgioh 6mo agolove this
- high_priest 6mo agoThis is why humans are better (for now) than AI.
- wabstractions 6mo ago[dead]
- maxloh 6mo agoSo 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.
- _the_inflator 6mo agoQuarkdown 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.
- dash2 6mo agoCommonmark (https://commonmark.org https://commonmark.org) is a specification designed to address this issue.
- slowmovintarget 6mo agoOrg. 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.
- karmakaze 6mo agoThis could also be a cool export/exchange format for Google Docs and the like.
- sieve 6mo agoI 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.
- SilentM68 6mo agoAny AppImages planned for the future?
- arkensaw 6mo agomaybe I'm being dense, but why do people keep reinventing markdown to make it more like HTML when HTML exists?
- iamgioh 6mo agoEasier to read, easier to write. On top of that, Quarkdown runs compile-time logic and scripting.
- sixhobbits 6mo agoLooks nice, but also the website is really nicely done. How did you make the animations?
- iamgioh 6mo agoThanks! Dynamic animations are from GSAP
- rambleraptor 6mo agoWhat’s GSAP?
- iamgioh 6mo agoFrontend animation library
- corvad 6mo agoBeen 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.
- katabatic 6mo agoBefore you know it we'll have re-invented LaTeX for a new generation.
- WalterBright 6mo agoAnother markup language that looks like RUNOFF from the 1970s. I used to use RUNOFF for my term papers.
- iamgioh 6mo agoI'll take that as a compliment
- WalterBright 6mo agoNo problem!
- schaefer 6mo agoAccording to the wiki, Quarkdown supports cross-references in the same document, but not cross-references across many documents.
- iamgioh 6mo agoThe wiki explains Quarkdown’s concept of subdocuments. A subdocument gets created when linking to another Quarkdown/Markdown file and populates a graph. Subdocuments inherit the linker’s properties but are then independent sandboxes that get compiled independently. A cross-subdocument cross-reference is such a niche use case that I don’t feel like it should break this design choice.
- enbugger 6mo agoHow 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.
- groby_b 6mo agoWait, we created the unholy unity of troff and markdown? Kidding aside, that kind of misses the point of either.
- trashb 6mo agoWhen reinventing markdown turns into recreating roff. I feel like a lot of people don't know about the power of the roff suites and that it is installed by default on a lot of systems. > Kidding aside, that kind of misses the point of either. I agree, in my view markdown is good because it is simple, if you want to use a proper markup language use roff.
- wetpaws 6mo ago[dead]
- bloppe 6mo agoMy 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.
- iamgioh 6mo agoQuarkdown uses actual functions that return values, they aren't macros. As for source readability, it's possible to define functions in a separate .qd file and import it via .include {myfile.qd}
- koliber 6mo agoAfter looking at it for 1 minute, it seems that this is to markdown what CSS is to HTML. How accurate is that?
- iamgioh 6mo agoI'd rather say Quarkdown is to Markdown what React is to HTML.
- timz 6mo agoSeems 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.
- iamgioh 6mo agoThanks! Installation instructions are on the homepage indeed
- erlkonig 6mo agoI 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-quarkdown/refs/heads/main/install.sh 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.
- iamgioh 6mo agowhat do you suggest?
- nfrankel 6mo agoOr just use Asciidoc...
- commenter711 6mo agoSoooo, Typst?
- v3ss0n 6mo agoIt 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.
- Igor_Wiwi 6mo agoFor 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 https://mdview.io/s/97af684b
- niemandhier 6mo agoCool. 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.
- lynx97 6mo agoIf 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.
- mblome 6mo agoComing at this from the AsciiDoc side (we ship a Mac/iPad authoring app there): Quarkdown's syntax design looks clean, especially the user-defined functions. The harder problem in this category, in my experience, isn't necessarily the source language though. I'd say the output pipeline is the tough one. Markdown extensions for cross-refs, admonitions, conditional content, function-based reuse — design-wise, those are tractable. The gap most projects in this space hit is downstream: tagged PDF that conforms to PDF/UA, deterministic builds across environments, hreflang and cross-document linking for multi-language docs sites, incremental rebuilds that don't choke on a 500-page book. PDF/UA matters more in the EU since the European Accessibility Act took effect on 28 June 2025. Curious what the plan looks like there for the four doctypes — paged in particular.