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.

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revolvingthrow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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0x3444ac53 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?

	▲	kitchi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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nzoschke 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Consider djot for the comparison list too.

It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.

https://djot.net/

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ahofmann 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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flexagoon 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative

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iamgioh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR

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t-kalinowski an hour ago | parent [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Of course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)

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thangalin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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/

Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.

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vova_hn2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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dleeftink 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

- 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

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smartmic 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 …

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amai 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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netbioserror 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.