Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
118 points
by amai
7 hours ago
| 10 comments
| quarkdown.com
| HN
FailMore
10 minutes ago
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I really like the docs idea. I think it’s great to automatically render the side menu.

The prevalence of Markdown from agents made me work on something similar too. My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) was on the /show page a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).

Sdocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web

I like the fact it doesn’t require you to install anything to get a great experience.

Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):

  https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)... 
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").

The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.

This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.

I’m working on a few new features at the moment:

1. Commenting (so you can easily comment on a markdown file and feed that back to your agent)

2. A powerful slides functionality

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amai
3 hours ago
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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.

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revolvingthrow
11 minutes ago
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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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thangalin
9 minutes ago
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> 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.

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ahofmann
2 hours ago
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flexagoon
2 hours ago
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That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
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nzoschke
2 hours ago
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Consider djot for the comparison list too.

It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.

https://djot.net/

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smartmic
1 hour ago
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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 …
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amai
1 hour ago
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Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.
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netbioserror
1 hour ago
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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.
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noelwelsh
3 hours ago
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On a quick read of the docs I'm a bit worried Quarkdown doesn't have the right evaluation model for the job. Text layout typically iterates to a fixed point, because adjusting the layout of one part of the document can throw out layout at another part, require another layout pass and so on. Typst has the concept of context[1] for this. I didn't see anything in Quarkdown that seemed similar, though perhaps I missed it.

I switched from pandoc / md / LaTex to Typst for my book[2], and have been very happy with it. Programming in a modern language is nice, and Typst is much faster than pandoc + LaTex.

[1]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/context/

[2]: https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/

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frizlab
28 minutes ago
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I don’t think adding things to markdown is a good way to go. Markdown is just a poor language, period. Alternatives like Asciidoc make much more sense IMHO.
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hirako2000
1 hour ago
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It's nice in that it extends markdown rather than reinventing a different syntax.

But the point of markdown, is to simply, markdown. Everything beyond that is deemed superfluous and cumbersome as it would defeat the point. Just write things down.

It's the right balance between plain text and latex and the rest.

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runningmike
3 hours ago
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Nice! But in the Comparison should be MyST - https://mystmd.org/ This is the new markdown standard to be….
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dnlzro
3 hours ago
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Or even Typst (not an extension of Markdown, but it has very similar goals and use cases).
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spidermonkey23
3 hours ago
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I was looking for something like this, but would love if it had CV formatted doc. I just want something easy to update, but easier to version control Vs docx.
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podviaznikov
2 hours ago
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demos look super clean!

I try to support multiple formats on my app: typst, mdx, marp, reveal, latex.

i think it should be possible to add support for quark down too

https://sublimated.com/docs/typst https://sublimated.com/docs/typst/demo/article.typ

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sputknick
59 minutes ago
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The nice thing is that with LLMs using markdown we are getting a nice ecosystem for a universal method for communicating textual information. The negative is that Markdown is starting to look like the https://xkcd.com/927/ cartoon.
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threetonesun
29 minutes ago
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The silly part is having n+1 Markdown standards that all end up rendering as HTML anyway. Personally if it's a plain text file sure, basic Markdown is fine, beyond that just give me some kind of rich text editor that stores as HTML and let me do whatever and not have to hand format a Markdown table.
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Aeroi
57 minutes ago
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how is it for converting streaming api responses from LLM's?
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