Comment by mastermage
15 hours ago
For Latex I agree thats definitely. Markdown I am unsure as Markdown is not meant for creating documents but to just have a little Richt Text Markup in READMEs and other Text files. Typst needs a compile step and altough that one is fast as hell it is still different from Markdown that renders directly from the file without an intermediary.
Right; but markdown has expanded beyond that niche. Lots of projects use markdown for other stuff - like mdbook, or for blogs.
I think markdown is a great format for readme files. But for real documentation, the added features of typst are fantastic. Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly!
I want typst for blogging, long form articles and documentation. Markdown is great for small stuff. But it doesn't scale.
Fascinating Ideas I love hearing opinions on this, it enriches me.
I do belive that atleast simple files like for example READMEs will stay and perhaps are better to stay as Markdown. One advantage that has is that while scripting is cool, It make the document not plain text readable which is a tradeoff one can argue.
Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Academic papers and books, novels, thousands of ebooks, have been written in single file markdowns for 15 years.
Writing directly in typst is good for small things with intense typesetting like ... wedding invitations, advertisements. But it doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers.
Writing is not typesetting.
All the forms need for the composition of all civilized text were present in word perfect 5.1, which unlike Word, Latex and Typst, permitted no typsetting during the process of writing. They were all recovered in the writers' markdowns nearly two decades ago.
I'm not sure what you mean. Markdown compared to typst or latex is extremely limited and using it for books or academic papers is very niche. I certainly would (and have for all my previous publications) prefer typst or latex over markdown. I also don't understand your point about not permitting typesetting during writing. Latex and text are the prime examples of separating writing from typesetting.
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So LaTeX also doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers?
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> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting.
Huh? I roll to doubt. How do you do this stuff with markdown? I tried for ages but only got half-baked hacky "markdown extensions" which weren't even commonmark compliant. I've found nothing even remotely as powerful as typst in the markdown world.
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What's the state for generating websites from Typst?
The problem with markdown is that it's not extensible and that there is no spec. Essentially all READMEs would be better off using typst, they would make for better READMEs.
I do not think that is the problem with markdown lol. There are lots of problems with markdown, especially vanilla or the more limited versions of it - but really its super power is that it is readable with a regular text editor (or `cat`) and can be rendered without a compilation step.
Markdown is not competing with latex or typst, it is competing with (and has won against) .txt files
Actually basic typst is as readable as markdown, e.g. this is the example from the webapp:
As I said in a previous comment typst especialy with extending via scripting stops being plain text readable. A Markdown file (whatever flavor it may be) is still fundamentaly one vi,nano, Editor, Notepad++ away from being read with all its context included. It is a tradeoff that for READMES I would not want to make.
If you restrict typat to the basic functionally of markdown it is just as readable as plain text (not surprising considering that typat syntax was inspirered by markdown). However, once we include more unusual things I would argue that markdown becomes more illegible than typst (as for markdown you start adding html essentially).
There have been theoretically precise published specs for serious markdowns for 15 years. The commonmark convention is a common specification for many including e.g the familiar simple github variant, which emphatically does have a completely perfect specification.
Commonmark isn't serious because it doesn't include several major quality of life improvements like [^1] for footnote/reference syntax. Pandoc should be the serious "common" markdown standard.
Of course it's extensible, you can put HTML in it, and HTML is extensible.
That is like saying "Ruby is not slow, you can write native extensions in C". No, Markdown is not extensible.