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Comment by revolvingthrow

19 hours ago

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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revolvingthrow

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sbinnee  11 hours ago

> (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.

0x3444ac53  18 hours ago

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

  • kitchi  17 hours ago

    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.

  • CJefferson  8 hours ago

    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.