As an experiment, I recommend to you to put a markdown file into google translate and make pdf via your preferred markdown parser. Now make the corresponding typst document, put it through google translate and enjoy compilation hell.

It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers of all sorts have been principal participants of the lists for almost two decades.

I would rather use microsoft word than write in raw typst, which is no different from trying to think in raw latex - even if in some fields it is necessary. I certainly cannot write unless I can output to docx.

A hundred things would be completely impossible to me without a 'lifeless' text format like markdown. The inclusion of a turing complete programming language into document composition - the principal labor distinctive of advanced civilization - is obviously pure insanity, even if it is necessary in the mathematical case. What one needs are ways of introducing the exact features that e.g. wordperfect 5.1 had already completely perfected: paragraphing, sectioning, noting, emphasizing, citing, etc. These are the internal semantic features of actual expression of actual thought, things that must be preserved e.g. by a translator - as sexy typesetting need not be. Considier the question: What is that which must be preserved by a translator? It is the question: What is thought? If I am typing typsetting commands not relevant to this, I am not writing, I am not thinking, I am not constructing a reasoned argument: I am doing high quality page-scale finger painting.

For example, I now consider it intellectual malpractice to give advanced students a translated text for close study, without also supplying the original in parallel. I can do this by simply zipping two markdown files together header to header, paragraph to paragraph with a simple script making html - the original in, say, smaller type narrower column at left margin.

The translation can be changed or an alternative constructed or a new one produced automatically by one of the translation devices. This is an operation that is basically impossible with genuine typesetting, though each md file compiles to pdf e.g. via typst after a markdown->typst process.

This is quite as impossible in typst as it is in latex - huge projects have been devoted to it in latex with complete failure - the necessity of pagination introduces the necessity of precise knowledge of both languages if the page break happens ... in medias sentence - such people e.g. the Loeb library used to have. With html it's a complete picnic, a literal zip operation with a markdown reader -- but of course isn't proper typsetting. The merit is that html is unpaginated. The file for each language itself makes a perfectly sound typst pdf with a keystroke.

If they need to do typsetting, as mathematicians in fact do. Mathematics breaks the civilized opposition of content and format, because it involves the invention of symbols on the fly. Reasoning about this is actually quite simple but the typst brigaders have no experience with the history of the topic.

It is universal that the flood of largely automated hackernews typst brigaders cannot make a single post without flatly lying about every other existing instrument. On this site I have never read a single true statement by a typst brigader about latex or markdown, but I have read literally /hundreds/ of lies. If these accounts are real and not bots, the community is fated to die, unfortunately.

I use typst countless times a day, but don't need to lie.

I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.

It is perfectly serious, though hobbled by various recalcitrant forces. For example, if I write using only ye olde original markdown devices, pandoc will render as it would commonmark. The core commonmark idea is to have an unambiguous specification of /the original syntax/ -- which emphatically didnt exist: the perl regex script was the only actual specification.

Part of the problem is that people want to say 'markdown' but John Gruber, pissing on the corpse of Aaron Schwarz, falsely claims total possession of everything that comes under that head, and that there must be no independent specification. This simple fact totally destroys the entire milieu. 80% of complaints about 'markdown' are due to his recalcitrance. Thus there can be no spec, no spec specifying extensions, etc. He does not want anything like html to be defined as he will lose ... I'm not sure what, since he is deeply evil, as this one case shows with total clarity. Industrial interests would be enough to get an html-like convention if it were otherwise.

Ruby is extensible as well, these things flourish because their creators thought hard about escape hatches. The things that are not extensible we don't talk about because they already died.