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.

- 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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I think we can have this as a plugin in https://voiden.md/

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.

How accurate is that?

Kidding aside, that kind of misses the point of either.

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.