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Comment by JohnKemeny | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend testing Markdown and Pandoc. It's open source, and it can export to pdf (via latex), html, latex, doc(x), odt, rst, wiki, ...

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The upcoming 1.4 release of quarto is going to have support for Typst as an output format (https://quarto.org/docs/prerelease/1.4/typst.html).

As capable as it is, Latex is just too damn complicated unless you're using someone's carefully maintained template and never trying to deviate, even slightly, from the template. Too many brain cells have been sacrificed to LaTeX. It's time to move on. Hopefully Typst can pull it off.

Thanks. Good to know. I've been learning quarto for the past 3 weeks and I'm amazed how flexible it is. Knowing it'll support typst makes it even flexibler.

Yes, Quarto with Typst for typesetting is how I plan to try and transition things to over time. Every new project, whether I'm just writing something up, creating a short presentation, or doing a data analysis, everything starts as a Quarto project now.

I needed a pretty PDF with headers and footers. Markdown was not expressive enough.

As of late I’ve been using restructuredtext and rst2latex.py and have been quite happy with it. I’m quite used to LaTeX for writing equations and RST handles most of the other boilerplate. If you do need to do fancy TeX things you can still just drop that inline and it generally works pretty good.

RestructuredText is pretty awful in my experience. Barely documented and unreliable.

Asciidoc is much much much better.

Interesting! I picked it up because of Sphinx primarily. The ability to extend it to pretty easily and cleanly add things like project management blocks is awesome. The Emacs ReST mode generally works pretty good. The only thing that kind of tripped me up was the indentation rules around bullet points.

Just had a quick look at AsciiDoc and it does have some features that look really nice (e.g. the include:: blocks are quite reminiscent of how I structured my LaTeX MSc thesis). And it looks like it similarly has an extension API that would likely fit some of the project management stuff I put together. Neat!

> The ability to extend it to pretty easily and cleanly add things like project management blocks is awesome.

I agree but the issue is that the APIs to do the extension are really really badly documented.

Also it's quite buggy. Things don't compose very well, e.g. if you want to have nested blocks.

Asciidoc is extensible in the same way, but it actually works properly.

I wrote many physical books in rst. (see rst2nitrile).

Last year I decided to join the 21st century and migrated my tool to be Pandoc and markdown based. I'm still writing code for my toolchain, but now I'm using tools that much more folks are using.

I use obsidian-md to convert Markdown to nice PDFs.

For me, I use Emacs org-mode's latex export. It works pretty well plus I use org-mode for other stuff anyway.

For me, getting Latex out of the dependency chain is a huge attraction. Just too much cruft and slowness and mysterious errors. Seems way too outdated today. I hope something like typst can provide a nice, fast and modern pdf generator backend. My understanding is that pandoc already supports typst.

Pandoc also supports typst https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/127

For what it's worth, you can move Markdown -> Typst by way of Pandoc.

Pandoc can export to typst and pdf via typst since, I think, 3.0 version.

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