Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

I guess yea I'm impressed, but to me the whole point of Markdown is that it's dirt simple. You can edit it and use it without any kind of GUI and have a pretty good idea what you are going to get. You can create it in VIM in a terminal, and trust what you did is going to look fine. Heck you can just look at the raw .md file and read it just fine.

But then you start adding to it. Soon you find yourself looking up all the odd new commands. And wishing for a WYSIWYG editor because you can't remember the commands or not sure what it will look like without the live render.

It's a bit like saying, "Hey this QWERTY keyboard is nice, but what if it had keys for all the Cyrillic, Devanagari, Chinese, and Arabic characters too? Wouldn't that be great?" Well, yea. But you just put the hunt back in hunt and peck.

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.

By the Standard Model of Physics Software you can edit Quarkdown in Atom to get Quarkup and change your Neutron Mail to Proton Mail, but it only works if you type with your left hand and create an Electron app and an anti-Neutrinos AI blogpost.

Looks nice, but also the website is really nicely done. How did you make the animations?

Quarkdown author and project lead here. I started Quarkdown as a uni research project and couldn't imagine what it would end up being 2 years later. Thanks for engaging! I'll try and respond to your comments.

I having a proofreading project and have been storing structured text using an s-expr serialization of XML. But MD is just so convenient that I decided that starting from scratch and building around the idea made sense. I considered typst for a while but... while it is a good intermediate format if you want to produce PDFs, it is not a good and permanent storage format. Even looked at quarkdown I believe. Same opinion.

So I came up with a mini markup language built around directives and fenced blocks. A simple template import allows MD semantics (the stuff I care about) in the project. The idea is that the core is stable. You simply write schema validators for your schema and transformers for the output format. Probably 2-300 lines of python all-in-all for a "book+chapters" schema with an html transformer.

I did not fall into the trap of implementing a Turing complete programming language in it like so many other systems. If you want behavior, piggyback on directives and write a python transformer to manipulate the AST.

I got interested in something else soon after, so it will probably be a few more months till I have the time and the inclination to finalize and publish everything.

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/

As an SSG user, I prefer the cleanest markdown as input, and putting all the formatting details into the CSS. E.g. I don't need `.abstract`, the CSS will format the first paragraph as an abstract without me asking explicitly.

OTOH I see this as a way to produce more rich self-contained documents. There's no CSS, but there's a bunch of predefined styling options. I can't help but see the early HTML in it. HTML 1 did not have colors and barely any formatting, comparable to Markdown. HTML 3 had stuff already like <center>, etc.

Nice! But in the Comparison should be MyST - https://mystmd.org/ This is the new markdown standard to be….

Quarkdown is a step in the right direction. One step closer to HTML.

Tough call. I think Markdown is not an authoring tool at all. In fact if you read through the changelog of GitHub Markdown, you will read a very detailed critique of the shortcomings of MD.

It isn’t a specification. This is MD’s biggest weakness as well as strength.

## can be a subheading or heading level 2.

How about an empty line between paragraphs or after headlines?

After reading this I consider MD an idea. A fantastic idea but not a spec.

maybe I'm being dense, but why do people keep reinventing markdown to make it more like HTML when HTML exists?

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

This could also be a cool export/exchange format for Google Docs and the like.

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.

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.

So this is actually competing in the typesetting space, likely with Typst. Both aim to become a simpler alternative to LaTeX without that pain in the ass.

I think they are missing an opportunity to fix a poor design decision in Markdown. Instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_. That extra asterisk really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet. I hope they fix that in v3.

Wow I love this !

I think we can have this as a plugin in https://voiden.md/

I became a big LaTex fan (from my time studying Physics)... So glad to see people expanding on it. Nice work!

Any AppImages planned for the future?

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.

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

Org.

Org is what you're looking for. Org Mode in Emacs, and all the org-* packages that make it so unbelievably useful. LaTeX integration, task management, scheduling, word processing, embedded images (if you must)... Org.

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.

how is it for converting streaming api responses from LLM's?

Quarkdown is a step in the right direction. One step closer to HTML.

Tough call. I think Markdown is not an authoring tool at all. In fact if you read through the changelog of GitHub Markdown, you will read a very detailed critique of the shortcomings of MD.

It isn’t a specification. This is MD’s biggest weakness as well as strength.

## can be a subheading or heading level 2.

How about an empty line between paragraphs or after headlines?

After reading this I consider MD an idea. A fantastic idea but not a spec.

maybe I'm being dense, but why do people keep reinventing markdown to make it more like HTML when HTML exists?

I really like the docs idea. I think it’s great to automatically render the side menu.

Sdocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web

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

  https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...

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

This could also be a cool export/exchange format for Google Docs and the like.

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.

So this is actually competing in the typesetting space, likely with Typst. Both aim to become a simpler alternative to LaTeX without that pain in the ass.

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.

You can achieve any layout you want thanks to the .row, .column and .grid function. A built-in CV template library is planned for the next minor release (https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/issues/472)

Wow I love this !

I think we can have this as a plugin in https://voiden.md/

Looks nice, but also the website is really nicely done. How did you make the animations?

I got interested in something else soon after, so it will probably be a few more months till I have the time and the inclination to finalize and publish everything.

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/

Any AppImages planned for the future?

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

Org.

To me, one of the big features of markdown is it's half WYSIWYG.

By that I mean, the basics reuse the way we faked formatting to do real formatting. The input is (usually) perfectly readable on its own.

Even if you don't know (or remember) how to author a markdown file, you can probably still read it just fine. The tables still look like tables. The paragraphs are just paragraphs.

I do still have to look up how to do stuff in markdown sometimes. And that's fine. Your active vocabulary is always smaller than your passive one.

So the way I judge this is by how readable the input is.

I'm not sure how well they succeeded at that. A lot of what they show doesn't really add to or take away from that.

But I didn't see any examples of them formatting math. I only rarely use LaTex. And when I do, it's not because I need a "paged" mode or need to include an author. It's because I need to format something markdown can't do, and that's usually a math equation.

So I am curious how that ends up looking.

FWIW, Obsidian.md makes a fantastic WYSIWYG editor for basic markdown.

Going to work on a Quarkdown with even more Superpowers and a seamless UI/UX so you don't need to remember all the odd new commands.

I shall call it Microsoft Word.

That's a good argument. However, Quarkdown is still a strict upgrade over typing latex directly or whatever, and you get more predictable results and better compatibility with LLM-assisted editing than with a GUI editor like Word.

I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages:

- MyST

- Pandoc

- Quarkdown

- Quarto

- Typst

Would you consider "fixing" the bold syntax on v3?

I have always believed that instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_.

That extra asterisk is a poor design decision in markdown. It really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet.

It strikes me as odd to add functions to a text format, given that even in GUI documents macros are usually avoided. Was Quarkdown designed for complex and repetitive documents?

Thank you for volunteering to field questions.

I read https://iamgio.eu/2025-12-10-accidentally-in-silicon-valley/ and it appears it worked out well – I'm happy for you!

Nice! But in the Comparison should be MyST - https://mystmd.org/ This is the new markdown standard to be….

Or even Typst (not an extension of Markdown, but it has very similar goals and use cases).

Myst with Sphinx is great. I miss strong LSP support though—or at least I didn’t manage to get it run in helix. I built my blog with pydata-sphinx-theme and myst

I'm not familiar with it. Feel free to update the table in a PR

I became a big LaTex fan (from my time studying Physics)... So glad to see people expanding on it. Nice work!

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.

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.

how is it for converting streaming api responses from LLM's?

LLM's aren't too familiar with Quarkdown's extensions and functions yet. But handling base Markdown is definitely doable. Please keep me updated!

why did my question get downvoted twice? I'm looking for markdown renders that can take llm output to beautiful markdown format?

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?

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/

> 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.

- 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

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 …

Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.

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.

To me, one of the big features of markdown is it's half WYSIWYG.

By that I mean, the basics reuse the way we faked formatting to do real formatting. The input is (usually) perfectly readable on its own.

Even if you don't know (or remember) how to author a markdown file, you can probably still read it just fine. The tables still look like tables. The paragraphs are just paragraphs.

I do still have to look up how to do stuff in markdown sometimes. And that's fine. Your active vocabulary is always smaller than your passive one.

So the way I judge this is by how readable the input is.

I'm not sure how well they succeeded at that. A lot of what they show doesn't really add to or take away from that.

So I am curious how that ends up looking.

FWIW, Obsidian.md makes a fantastic WYSIWYG editor for basic markdown.

Consider djot for the comparison list too.

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

https://djot.net/

- 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

> 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.

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.

LLM's aren't too familiar with Quarkdown's extensions and functions yet. But handling base Markdown is definitely doable. Please keep me updated!

why did my question get downvoted twice? I'm looking for markdown renders that can take llm output to beautiful markdown format?

Going to work on a Quarkdown with even more Superpowers and a seamless UI/UX so you don't need to remember all the odd new commands.

I shall call it Microsoft Word.

Since it’s an upgrade of markdown, you should have called it "markup".

See, that's the Markdown-Word spiral i was talking about...

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

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

That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative

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.)

See, that's the Markdown-Word spiral i was talking about...

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.

Would you consider "fixing" the bold syntax on v3?

I have always believed that instead of **bold** and *italic*, it should be *bold* and _italic_.

That extra asterisk is a poor design decision in markdown. It really makes it inconvenient to edit Markdown on a phone or tablet.

It strikes me as odd to add functions to a text format, given that even in GUI documents macros are usually avoided. Was Quarkdown designed for complex and repetitive documents?

Thank you for volunteering to field questions.

I read https://iamgio.eu/2025-12-10-accidentally-in-silicon-valley/ and it appears it worked out well – I'm happy for you!

Or even Typst (not an extension of Markdown, but it has very similar goals and use cases).

Myst with Sphinx is great. I miss strong LSP support though—or at least I didn’t manage to get it run in helix. I built my blog with pydata-sphinx-theme and myst

I'm not familiar with it. Feel free to update the table in a PR

Since it’s an upgrade of markdown, you should have called it "markup".

This sounds to me like it might benefit from some sort of "hypertext" functionality to allow for easy linking of documents

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.

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

This sounds to me like it might benefit from some sort of "hypertext" functionality to allow for easy linking of documents

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.

Everything you say is true, although Typst is making slow headway¹.

Also, it’s possible, using some Pandoc magic², to enjoy aspects of Typst markup while generating a LaTeX document.

1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

2 https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/

I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR

Memories are failable :) Here is the PR you merged June of last year, changing the file extension from `.qmd` to `.qd` after a discussion about Quarto: https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90

Everything you say is true, although Typst is making slow headway¹.

Also, it’s possible, using some Pandoc magic², to enjoy aspects of Typst markup while generating a LaTeX document.

1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

2 https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/

Memories are failable :) Here is the PR you merged June of last year, changing the file extension from `.qmd` to `.qd` after a discussion about Quarto: https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90

Of course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)

No boilerplate

Spend your time writing

and don't worry about the rest.

.docauthor {Jennifer Chu}

.pagemargin {topright}
    .docauthor | MIT News

# X-ray flashes from a supermassive black hole

!(70%)[Black hole](img/blackhole.jpg)

.abstract
    One supermassive black hole has kept astronomers glued to their scopes
    for the last several years.
    The black hole in question is `1ES 1927+654`, which is about as
    massive as a million suns and sits in a galaxy that is 270 million
    light-years away.
    In 2018, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere observed that the black
    hole’s corona — a cloud of whirling, white-hot plasma — suddenly
    **disappeared**, before reassembling months later.
    The brief though dramatic shut-off was a first in black hole astronomy.

> This would be the closest thing we know of around any black hole.
> - Megan Masterson, a graduate student in physics at MIT

Rendered article about X-ray flashes from a supermassive black hole

Batteries included

Complete authoring experience

Write Markdown to reach flow state faster.
Use Quarkdown's extensions to achieve more.

First page of a scientific paper with title, abstract and introduction Second page of a scientific paper with formulas and a results table

Versatile

One tool to rule them all

Whether you are writing a research paper, a quick report, a company-wide wiki, class notes, or preparing interactive slides for your next talk, there's only one line you need.

Replaces

LaTeXLaTeXTypstTypst

.doctype {paged}

Paged document output showing a formatted article

For articles, books and reports.

Replaces

NotionNotionObsidianObsidian

.doctype {plain}

Plain document output showing a coffee brewing guide

For notes, knowledge bases and simple static websites.

Replaces

GitBookGitBookDocusaurusDocusaurusMkDocsMaterial for MkDocsVitePressVitePress

.doctype {docs}

Documentation website output

For wikis, technical documentation and large knowledge bases.

Replaces

BeamerLaTeXGoogle SlidesGoogle Slides

.doctype {slides}

Slide presentation output

For lectures, talks and interactive presentations.

Reactive preview

Typesetting for the impatient

With blazing fast compilation and live preview, see results instantly as you type.

Turing complete

Don't repeat yourself

Reuse your workflow thanks to powerful scripting capabilities.

.function {animal}
    name ecosystem picture:
    .row
        .clip {circle}
            .picture

        - **Name**: .name
        - **Ecosystem**: .ecosystem

.animal {Red panda} ecosystem:{Temperate forests}
    ![Red panda](img/red-panda.jpg)

.animal {Sea otter} ecosystem:{Kelp forests}
    ![Sea otter](img/sea-otter.jpg)

.animal {Clownfish} ecosystem:{Coral reefs}
    ![Clownfish](img/clownfish.jpg)

Animal cards rendered from a custom function

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers

Discussion

Discussion

Spend your time writing

Complete authoring experience

One tool to rule them all

Typesetting for the impatient

Don't repeat yourself