[josephg]

> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting.

Huh? I roll to doubt. How do you do this stuff with markdown? I tried for ages but only got half-baked hacky "markdown extensions" which weren't even commonmark compliant. I've found nothing even remotely as powerful as typst in the markdown world.

[applicative]

I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.

[_flux]

Typst html support is already available as an experimental feature, so e.g. EPUB probably isn't too much work in addition to that (as I understand it, it's basically zipped HTML with some metadata). It's also in the roadmap: https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export .

If the translator has access to a service like typst.app, then I don't see too many obstacles for translating. But I don't have any experience on doing translations.

[applicative]

Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.

[_flux]

Perhaps you would enjoy the rest of the tooling, that may be useful in scientific contexts or in books discussing programming languages. Or perhaps you would also want to publish in PDF, like for an actual print book.

What kind of issues did you expect to encounter in translating Typst documents to other languages?

[josephg]

I’ve never seen a markdown based workflow which supports the features I listed. If I’m wrong, it would be easy to demonstrate it by citing some tools.

Just calling me a liar for disagreeing with you will convince nobody.

[applicative]

> Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly!

it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup - and you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles, calling a C compiler, etc. Why not use microsoft word? I find markdowns irritating in many ways -- only those are not among them. Why would I want an intellectual document to be in a programming language?

[josephg]

> it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup

Yes, I've been quite clear on that point. Markdown isn't powerful enough for some of the writing I do.

Upthread you wrote this:

> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years

If this were true, I would have used markdown. If this were true, you would be able to cite a good markdown based tool which had the features I need. You have not.

> you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

What a strange thing to say. Why would I lie? My needs are quite simple. I want a tool to let me write and publish beautiful essays. (And documentation and the like). Like this:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/

I tried really hard to make markdown do what I want. I wrote this with markdown a few years ago:

https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-go-brrr/

But markdown isn't powerful enough. For example, I want my diagrams to have captions. And I want to be able to reference to my diagrams from the body - eg "In Diagram 3, ...." and have the diagram in a little box which says "Diagram 3" at the top. And if you click a diagram, it should open a lightbox. I tried a bunch of markdown tooling, but none of it did what I wanted. The bare-bones styling of that webpage is a result of me getting fed up fighting markdown. And I just hit publish.

> It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles

Bruh what? I want a good authoring tool. Something that lets me write words and render them as a beautiful webpage. Markdown is great for project readmes and things like that. But markdown is a bad tool for the rich, long form essays I want to write. The fact you don't know that isn't evidence that I'm lying. It's just evidence that you're ignorant about the tools I - and others - need to do our jobs.

If you're confused about my tool choice, some curiosity and humility would serve you better than vitriol.