Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anuramat 1 hour ago
I tried using markdown+pandoc for my notes for a while, but I couldn't figure out even the most basic things, mostly because of the dozens of incompatible flavors; in no particular order:

- formatting math blocks is mostly not a thing; some formatters will straight up break the document depending on the flavor you use

- lsp

- live preview; you could use e.g. a neovim plugin for that, but it's built on top of mathjax

- pandoc isn't even a single flavor, as you have a bunch of feature flags and multiple ways to do the same thing

- rendering with pandoc is pretty slow even for a few pages of lecture notes (especially compared to typst)

- latex (required by pandoc) is huge, meanwhile typst binary was something like 50M last time I checked

- syntax highlighting: markdown treesitter grammar only supports the common extensions, e.g. the esoteric latex block variants break the entire document

I guess if I didn't need math rendering, the only major complaint I'd have is performance, but at that point .txt is enough

2 comments

Latex is in no sense required by pandoc and never has been, not ten years ago, not twenty years ago. Everything you are writing is deep conceptual confusion from top to bottom. You might as well say it has required Microsoft Word since the docx readers and writers came out.

Latex is a typical route to produce pdfs according to your specification, but typst is what I use; occasionally groff. I use latex when what I am typesetting uses greek, arabic or hebrew text, but only because I haven't yet bothered to learn the typst approach to them.

only if you don't care about the output and half the features; otherwise you can just use "mv" to compile your documents to .txt
“latex (required by pandoc)”

No.

`--pdf-engine=typst`

but then you're limited to an undocumented subset of pandoc markdown
I don’t know what this means, but please don’t explain.

applicative’s comment is correct. Every one of your bullet points is wrong, except perhaps the one about treesitter highlighting, but what should one expect? Why should a Markdown parser know anything about arbitrary Markdown extensions?

> please don't explain

why are you even talking to me?