Comment by amai
1 day 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/). 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 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?
> (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)
I chuckled. I'd love to try out typst when the time comes. But for writing a journal paper, it's still going to be latex.
I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?
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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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.
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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%
Consider djot for the comparison list too.
It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.
https://djot.net/
You mean like this? https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison
That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Asciidoc was the sweet spot of features and readability for me. Really wish it had more tooling.
- 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
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.
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.
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 …
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.)
Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.