Quarkdown - Markdown with superpowers
18 points by gettalong
18 points by gettalong
Interesting. I’ve pretty much standardized on https://quarto.org (with python), but this is interesting.
I’m surprised the “Comparison” section omits R Markdown. I think it’s a good option for these sorts of projects since you have a mature programming language with well developed libraries for presenting tables, figures, etc.
Rendering uses the knitr package to run R code and then metadata and the markdown content are rendered with Pandoc.
There have been at least several statistics books published from R Markdown documents. R isn’t my favorite scripting language, but it’s what I’d reach for I wanted to do some sort of literate programming or dynamic report writing and wasn’t required to write in another language.
Yeah. I agree. You might already know this, but quarto is the successor to R markdown and is programming language agnostic. Org-mode also deserves an honorable mention. Its main drawback is that it is mostly tied to a particular environment (emacs), but options for other editors and on mobile is getting better.
Yeah, I’ll actually take your comment on org-mode one step further: there isn’t really a spec or canonical grammar. There is only one reference implementation and it’s written in elisp. Pandoc handles a good subset of org-mode but depending on which org-mode features you’re using it can fall on its face pretty hard. I’ve written my own parser before in Elixir and gotten pretty far but it’s never perfect without an actual spec to build against.
I love org-mode. And I’ve, in large part, stopped using it because you can’t really use it anywhere that doesn’t have an Emacs port (iPhone and iPad being two prime examples from my own life). I want to go back to it but I also want to be able to read and edit my work on my phone or tablet without a reliable internet connection (eg while flying).
I didn’t know about it. Thank you!
I also see that Knitr supports all sorts of languages and even lets you define your own so, yeah, Quarto looks like a terrific choice.
I wrote a sci-fi novel in R Markdown, and developed a Markdown editor with integrated YAML variable definitions to help. I stayed close to pandoc + knitr syntax.
Replacing the shell script(s) in the Typesetting Markdown series was one of the other goals for creating a standalone application.