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by fiddlosopher 4108 days ago
Although I'm involved in both these enterprises, let's not confuse their goals.

CommonMark is currently focused on the task of giving a decent spec for the core syntax and robust, efficient implementations; extensions will wait til that project is done, but certainly aren't ruled out.

Pandoc has always been in the game of extending the feature set. Here are just some of the Markdown extensions pandoc supports: LaTeX math (which can be rendered in a variety of formats, including native Word and MathML), LaTeX macros, inline LaTeX, automatically numbered examples and cross-references to these, automatically generated citations (using CSL styles), super and subscripts, strikeout, figures, YAML metadata, definition lists, several styles of tables, fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting, header identifiers, and footnotes. scholdoc just adds a few things on top of all this (and many of them could be implemented in pandoc filters). As noted in one of the other comments on this thread, most of the features scholdoc adds are under active discussion in pandoc as well. So it's not that pandoc and scholdoc have different aims; pandoc just moves more slowly, because it has to worry about how features are implemented in many more output formats, and it operates under some other constraints that scholdoc rejects (e.g. trying to avoid the use of English words like "Figure" for syntax cues).