Comment by beej71
1 day ago
I use Markdown for all my books, currently. It used to be a custom XML format, but that was really annoying to type even with custom Vim keybindings.
I do wish Markdown were more capable, but it's a good lowest common denominator for HTML and PDF. Also Pandoc-flavored markdown is pretty decent.
My current flow is:
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML -> page-splitter -> split HTML
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF
That last one is slow, and I'm hoping to replace it with Typst, probably:
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> docbook -> xlstproc -> typst -> PDF
I've tried other things like Sphinx and it's tough to find something that checks all the boxes I need.
In general, though, I'm pretty impressed with Typst. I wrote a test program that takes the XML output from cmark-gfm and converts it to Typst with xsltproc. It produces PDFs in orders of magnitude less time than Pandoc/LaTeX. I use that now for all my casual PDF documents. https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ
> I'm hoping to replace it with Typst
This might be stupid but is there a reason you want to go through docbook and xsltproc instead of setting --pdf-engine=typst?
Looks like it's getting there, but still needs some work. It's not obeying the book output or number sections. I can probably get the indexing going, though.
Measured at 10x faster than LaTeX.
Yes. Two reasons:
1) More control over the typst output... 2) I didn't know you could do that. :D :D :D
I'll check it out--thanks for the pointer!
Repo is nice, thanks. Small nit: it would be nice to have included the final PDF output of your tool on `test.md` in the repo.