I would really like to see a comparison of all these tools/markup languages:
- MyST
- Pandoc
- Quarkdown
- Quarto
- Typst
Quarto and pandoc both use Pandoc Markdown (and so does https://www.zettlr.com/). But Quarkdown and Typst offer programmable markup languages like LaTeX (or HTML + Javascript). It seems the winner for the title official LaTeX successor is still not decided.
I used (and will continue to use) most of those. Quick rules of thumb:
- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html
- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside
- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)
- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever
By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?
I don't care about missing features, but I just want a way to export to latex using typst.
It's okay if this is not the day to day tool used to render, but this should be possible. It's just a compiler between two languages, and latex happens to be Turing complete (and can display arbitrary things to a PDF), so it's 100% in the "not impossible" category
With such a tool nobody has to know if you use typst personally. Just like, say, nobody has to know you use jj rather than git
> (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)
I chuckled. I'd love to try out typst when the time comes. But for writing a journal paper, it's still going to be latex.
I've been testing it out by using it to create the quizzes for a course I'm teaching this semester. My conclusion is that it's well worth finding a way to try it out. Drastically reduces the amount of boilerplate.
(I haven't yet tried to write a full paper in it.)
I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?
No issues per se, but academic publishing has deep roots in the latex ecosystem. So templates from publishers are often not available in typst, or the publisher insists on a latex formatted file.
Often supervisors/professors etc will also resist using typst because of the cognitive overhead on their already oversubscribed time. Typst has about 40 years of history to overcome and that will take a long time to do.
Everything you say is true, although Typst is making slow headway¹.
Also, it’s possible, using some Pandoc magic², to enjoy aspects of Typst markup while generating a LaTeX document.
1 https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/
2 https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/
They made a new format with basically no accessibility. We finally got latex usable by blind people with acceptable html output, I’m not moving to something worse.
In what ways is HTML produced by transpiling LaTeX more accessible that HTML produced by Typst?
The HTML generated by LaTeX is currently very good (you can read basically every paper on arXiV in HTML). The html generated by Typst just.. doesn't really work currently. I checked a few weeks ago, tables didn't output sensibly. Looking at the docs their plan doesn't seem to be to aim for total coverage in general.
By “The HTML generated by LaTeX” do you mean by latexml (the tool used, I think, by arxiv) or something else?
Consider djot for the comparison list too.
It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.
https://djot.net/
I really wanted to like Typst. No more latex would be fantastic. Decided to use it for a project, and had to give up and return to latex, just too many corner cases. Both things its missing from latex, and lack of Pandoc convertibility. Really hope it gets the last 10%
Pandoc lives in a different tier because it gives you arbitrary filters so you can do any transformation you want on the intermediate JSON format. And it converts anything to and from that JSON format. So I prefer Pandoc based systems because anything the tool doesn't do that you want is probably implementable with a simple inline filter.
I agree with your preference, also largely because of filters. But note that the intermediate format is Pandoc’s internal abstract syntax tree, not JSON (https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/).
The older filter mechanism acted on a JSON serialization of the AST, but the current recommendation is to use Lua filters that work with the internal AST directly.
You mean like this? https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison
That doesn't include Quarto, which seems like the closest alternative
I'm not familiar with Quarto, feel free to update the table in a PR
Memories are failable :) Here is the PR you merged June of last year, changing the file extension from `.qmd` to `.qd` after a discussion about Quarto: https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown/pull/90
Of course, just saying I'm not familiar with the language itself and its capabilities! :)
> a comparison of all these tools/markup languages
It can take a long time to draft such comparisons; I crafted one for my own Markdown editor, which uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX:
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.
I don't think Typst fits in this list. They never claim to be some sort of markdown or have any overlap with it, and their core product is the compiler, not the language. Just because they added some syntactic sugar that sometimes somewhat resembles markdown doesn't make it a competitor.
That "syntactic sugar" encompasses the entire value proposition of markdown, there's nothing stopping you using Typst to author blog posts or take notes, they even have HTML export.
- paged.js[0] heeds the slow crawl towards the CSS paged media module, eventually allowing some truly great page-setting DX out-of-the box which it currently polyfills.
[0]: https://pagedjs.org
Asciidoc was the sweet spot of features and readability for me. Really wish it had more tooling.
I've produced a staggering variety of documents with Typst. Books, booklets, slides, cards, documentation, everything. In most cases I only need a minimum of custom styles and behaviors at the top, and very occasionally a whole styling module. Blows the rest of these tools out of the water full stop.
Yeah, I would really like if people who introduce a new project to an already very crowded space would start the introduction with "Why MyCoolProject instead of X?" section.
I am currently enjoying WYSIWYG with GNU TeXmacs for long-form or scientific text editing. Both, the concept and the tool, are amazingly capable and a breath of fresh air after all the LaTex, Markdown, Org s …
Almost nobody uses TeXmacs it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)
Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.