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by josephg 3 days ago
> 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.