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all of that is true, but markdown targets HTML as its "native backend", if you will. it is not feasible to render markdown -> pdf without having an intermediate HTML representation.

this is clear from the fact that HTML can be inlined in a markdown document; this is part of the spec (in so much as there even is a "spec" for markdown, anyway).

reST is also designed to have human readable source. You might not like it compared to markdown but it has to serve as a the docstring format of Python and does so fairly well.

The article convinced me that markdown is better for its purpose.