4 ms·

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages: - MyST - Pandoc - Quarkdown - Quarto - Typst Quarto and pandoc both use Pando

by amai 6mo 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/ 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 ago
You mean like this? https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison
- flexagoon 6mo ago
  That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
  - iamgioh 6mo ago
    I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR
    - t-kalinowski 6mo 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 https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90
      - iamgioh 6mo ago
        Of course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)
nzoschke 6mo ago
Consider 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 ago
  It 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.
smartmic 6mo ago
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 6mo 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.)
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
amai 6mo ago
Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/ https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.
netbioserror 6mo 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.
revolvingthrow 6mo 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 6mo ago
  I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?
  - kitchi 6mo 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 6mo 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. 1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/ 2 https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/ https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/
  - CJefferson 6mo ago
    They made a new format with basically no accessibility. We finally got latex usable by blind people with acceptable html output, I’m not moving to something worse.
thangalin 6mo 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: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.
- amai 6mo ago
  oh, wow. That must have been a lot of work.
dleeftink 6mo 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. [0]: https://pagedjs.org https://pagedjs.org
vova_hn2 6mo 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.
BrandonS113 6mo ago
I really wanted to like Typst. No more latex would be fantastic. Decided to use it for a project, and had to give up and return to latex, just too many corner cases. Both things its missing from latex, and lack of Pandoc convertibility. Really hope it gets the last 10%
mr_mitm 6mo ago
I don't think Typst fits in this list. They never claim to be some sort of markdown or have any overlap with it, and their core product is the compiler, not the language. Just because they added some syntactic sugar that sometimes somewhat resembles markdown doesn't make it a competitor.
- conorbergin 6mo ago
  That "syntactic sugar" encompasses the entire value proposition of markdown, there's nothing stopping you using Typst to author blog posts or take notes, they even have HTML export.
zmmmmm 6mo ago
Pandoc lives in a different tier because it gives you arbitrary filters so you can do any transformation you want on the intermediate JSON format. And it converts anything to and from that JSON format. So I prefer Pandoc based systems because anything the tool doesn't do that you want is probably implementable with a simple inline filter.
- leephillips 6mo ago
  I agree with your preference, also largely because of filters. But note that the intermediate format is Pandoc’s internal abstract syntax tree, not JSON (https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/). The older filter mechanism acted on a JSON serialization of the AST, but the current recommendation is to use Lua filters that work with the internal AST directly.
conception 6mo ago
Asciidoc was the sweet spot of features and readability for me. Really wish it had more tooling.

by amai 6mo ago

ahofmann 6mo ago

You mean like this? https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison

flexagoon 6mo ago
That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
- iamgioh 6mo ago
  I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR
  - t-kalinowski 6mo 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 https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90
    - iamgioh 6mo ago
      Of course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)

nzoschke 6mo ago

Consider 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 ago
It 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.

smartmic 6mo ago

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 6mo 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.)
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

amai 6mo ago

Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/ https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.

netbioserror 6mo 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.

revolvingthrow 6mo 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 6mo ago
I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?
- kitchi 6mo 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 6mo 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. 1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/ 2 https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/ https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/
- CJefferson 6mo ago
  They made a new format with basically no accessibility. We finally got latex usable by blind people with acceptable html output, I’m not moving to something worse.

thangalin 6mo 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: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.

amai 6mo ago
oh, wow. That must have been a lot of work.

dleeftink 6mo 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. [0]: https://pagedjs.org https://pagedjs.org

vova_hn2 6mo 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.

BrandonS113 6mo ago

I really wanted to like Typst. No more latex would be fantastic. Decided to use it for a project, and had to give up and return to latex, just too many corner cases. Both things its missing from latex, and lack of Pandoc convertibility. Really hope it gets the last 10%

mr_mitm 6mo ago

I don't think Typst fits in this list. They never claim to be some sort of markdown or have any overlap with it, and their core product is the compiler, not the language. Just because they added some syntactic sugar that sometimes somewhat resembles markdown doesn't make it a competitor.

conorbergin 6mo ago
That "syntactic sugar" encompasses the entire value proposition of markdown, there's nothing stopping you using Typst to author blog posts or take notes, they even have HTML export.

zmmmmm 6mo ago

Pandoc lives in a different tier because it gives you arbitrary filters so you can do any transformation you want on the intermediate JSON format. And it converts anything to and from that JSON format. So I prefer Pandoc based systems because anything the tool doesn't do that you want is probably implementable with a simple inline filter.

leephillips 6mo ago
I agree with your preference, also largely because of filters. But note that the intermediate format is Pandoc’s internal abstract syntax tree, not JSON (https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/). The older filter mechanism acted on a JSON serialization of the AST, but the current recommendation is to use Lua filters that work with the internal AST directly.

conception 6mo ago

Asciidoc was the sweet spot of features and readability for me. Really wish it had more tooling.